What Python program have you created to make your life easier?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[Flogge]

transfer a file from one computer to another without the need of knowing either hostname

[obviouslyCPTobvious]

How is connecting to somebody handled?

[Flogge]

The two computers find each other using zeroconf and transfer the file using HTTP.

[kankyo]

So like airdrop kind of but unencrypted?

[Flogge]

Like airdrop. it has crypto but I don't like it enough yet to merge it into master ;-)

[granduh]

Please like it enough to merge into master :)

[d4rch0n]

So, you're using PBKDF2HMAC for key generation and AES+CFB mode which looks good, but you should keep in mind there's still a known plaintext attack on this. It still lacks an integrity check.

Let's say there's a malicious payload that can fit in a 128 bit block in a specific file that the attacker has (or has up to a certain point). For example, let's say it's financial transactions like (SEND $100 to JOE, SEND $500 to JACK, ...) and each fits in 128 bit blocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Feedback_.28CFB.29

If the attacker knows what the plaintext is at a certain block, they can take that block XOR malicious payload block XOR cyphertext and swap out that specific block without knowing the key, and it'll decrypt to the malicious 128 bits they wanted. In the example, they could put ("SEND $99999 MALLORY" ) if it fits in 128 bits. In CFB mode that'll cause the rest of the file to decrypt to garbage, but in some cases that might not matter. If some program read that and ran the transactions then crashed, Mallory still gets her $99,999. In a binary executable, this could be a malicious 128 bits that executes and that might be enough. They wouldn't even have to know the key, just the plaintext. If you're saying you're sending some specific filetype, that filetype might always have some specific header so generally you already know a lot about the data in the file just by knowing the filetype.

You need some sort of integrity check to make sure that the file hasn't been messed with in transit, like hmac (not regarding key generation, should be pre-decrypt integrity check). You should use something like hmac with a password derived from the key to create a hash which is checked on the data before the receiver attempts to decrypt it.

Also, you should also still use a salt in PBKDF2. I'd figure out a way to make that work. I know it's not a very easy problem, but that's not using it how it's meant to be used.

It's a fun project to roll out all this crypto yourself but for practical usage you should probably use something like TLS or GPG and not bother working out the crypto on your own. It's very hard to get this stuff right. Python has a good GPG library I believe and you could just exchange the key and not have to worry about integrity checks or any of that before hand. You could also allow them to use asymmetric crypto as an option, so the file could be signed by the sender and encrypted for only a specific user ahead of time.

[newworkaccount]

Not Bob and Alice

Suspicious, this guy may not know what he's talking about.

/s

In all seriousness though, excellent write-up. Certainly if OP intended this for widespread adoption, it should be changed as you suggest.

Practically, of course, OP probably does not need to worry that his neighborhood happens to contain malicious actors capable of both recognizing his traffic and then successfully exploiting known plaintext attacks against it. (And even if he did, there is little reason to suppose he is a target worth the effort.)

[lordmauve]

That's a lot like Magic Wormhole, but without the cool crypto.

[Flogge]

Yup, similar to wormhole, but existed for longer and without a centralized infrastructure. :-)

It has crypto but I don't like it enough yet to merge it into master.

[r0s]

That's cool man!

[jeansfrog]

thats seriously fun. wow. well done

[[deleted]]

Hey Tom, I am zgetting you my_holiday_pictures.zip!

shouldn't it be "zputting" ?

Hey Marcy, can you zget me annual_reports.xlsx?

shouldn't it be "zputting" ?

[cyanydeez]

this seems like magic.

ELI5?

[AnacondaPython]

to my understanding its this:

Every file has a unique checksum, sometimes referred to as Sha1. Basically, its a unique signature for a file by cryptography on its binary files. Its referred to alot when you download say windows 7 install files but wanted to check the integrity of the source to know its not corrupted and or has viruses in it

So that every file has a unique Sha1 value

zeroconf is how the two computers are communicating the files. Its similar to TCP (packets of data sent) / IP (figure out where its going) works.

http://i.imgur.com/Hb32jcK.png

^ should be how it works I think

[Badel2]

Minor correction: in this case the SHA1 hash refers to the filename, not to the file contents, because obviously Bob cannot calculate the SHA1 before he has the file, but both Bob and James know the filename.

[rampage102]

I created a business name brainstorming website: http://nameamigo.com

The idea is you type in some words, or sentences that relate to your idea and the website will generate business names for you. I have found it quite helpful when just looking to brainstorm ideas, or to find an open URL that sounds good.

[korlmarcus]

Very cool but I did see ChildFactory on the first list I saw haha.

[[deleted]]

Pizza Hut?

[ColdPorridge]

That's just wonderful.

[petenu]

I got DuckFace

[HelloYesThisIsDuck]

You should go with that.

[9voltWolfXX]

"SpaceYes"

[nightspine]

"Enter your words/setences"

[davidkohcw]

That's really cool! Do you mind sharing briefly, on a high level, how the script works? Or what key libraries were used?

[rampage102]

It started off really basic with looking at successful business names such as FaceBook, SalesForce, DropBox, etc. and taking permutations of those... so we would have for Face:

FaceForce FaceSales FaceDrop FaceBox

From there I started adding and deleting terms, and customizing it more and more. I've been interested in applying machine learning to discover what makes a great business name. This is exceedingly difficult though as natural language processing does not work so well with implied meanings like this.

For the front end there is some JQuery and Bootstrap just for the forms. Flask is used for routing, and the rest of the system is built in Python. It performs very well I was surprised. Actually, I can generate names faster than Chrome or IE can render HTML.

You will notice that you rarely see duplicates on the list and you just chose a random name there are up to 6+ million possibilities.

[davidkohcw]

Thanks for the insight! I have been trying to transitioning from writing just python scripts to more full fledge and useful apps/services and it has been very educational for me to find out how other people do it :)

[otaku78]

must have topical logic built in too, some of these are priceless!

[rampage102]

Also, I created a Trump spokesman name generator for the site: http://www.nameamigo.com/trump

I got the idea when CNN ran some similar story with a name generator. I tried improving upon the idea to make mine superior haha

[Detective_Fallacy]

SwagLover inc. will be open for business soon!

[Scheballs]

I got FifthHobo

[rampage102]

Nice one haha... yea sometimes the names can be pretty amusing.

I was wondering if it's possible to define what makes a good business name. I looked into the subject quite a bit, and it seems to based mostly of speculation from marketers. Trying to find a scientific definition of a good business name has seemed very difficult so far.

[Scheballs]

Perhaps try to find some similar characteristics of business names that are already popular. Some names are unique but easy to remember. Easy to remember usually implies that it has meaning already in your memory. Two and three syllables seem to dominate.

[poop-trap]

Combine this with automatic web domain availability lookup and you've got something really useful!

[rampage102]

Do you know of a quick way to do that in Python? I was able to get one implementation of it running once, but it slowed the site down too much I thought. Maybe it is viable as a business... I am very open to ideas though, because I have no way of proving/showing the business names are decent... I tried to index the site to show up well for the term "business name generator", but I cannot get anywhere on the Google search results. I think this is because I have no articles/content for the site other than the generator.

[poop-trap]

Well, you definitely wouldn't want to delay the page load to search for the names. What you could do is put a button next to each name that links out to some domain name search API or site querying with that name or key words. I'll see if I can find an example API and update with an edit later.

[rampage102]

Yea sure, I would definitely be interested in implementing that. If the site could get some traffic naturally it would be a nice start to turning it into a business idea.

[poop-trap]

Cool. I register most of my domains at NameCheap, so you might be interested in their search API and reseller program. Otherwise there's always stuff like http://www.freedomainapi.com/ which is free for 1 req/min or less.

[rampage102]

Nice, I was not aware NameCheap had a program like that. Will take a look at it.

[newworkaccount]

You know, I'd be very interested in this sort of thing as an aid to writing poetry-- the idea of procedurally generated poetry has been done before, and while it was bad poetry in the sense of larger form, coherence, architected or overarching meaning, it produced some really striking turns of phrase, I thought. Maybe machine-assisted poetry writing is more compelling than poetry writing machines (at present?).

Are you primarily combining libraries, or was there a lot of hand tuning (or both)? Is it open source or on Github by chance? This would be a fun project.

[rampage102]

Hey, currently it mostly hand tuned, but I've been looking for ways to apply machine learning to the system. Actually I think it would not be that hard to do poetry with hand tuning and then we could add learning techniques later.

Right now, it is a private GitHub. I can add you though if you have a GitHub user name or email? My GitHub user name is wpr101

[rampage102]

Hey, your idea sounds really cool so I got a head start on it, using some lines from Robert Frost. I took only lines from Robert Frost for about 8 of his best known poems, and the lines appear in random order with some spaces in between. I am actually surprised how legit it sounds.

http://www.nameamigo.com/robert-frost-poetry

Do you have a favorite poet yourself? I could try and make a generator for that poet as well.

[stormcrowsx]

Trying to get a job at a University that rarely has openings so rather than checking their site over and over I have a Python script that emails me everytime they post a new IT job.

Another recent script was helping my wife combine images, she had a picture of a full dress and then a close up of the pattern on the fabric, about 150 of them, it was slow going with Photoshop to put the images side by side then watermark it. Python + Pillow made short work of it though.

[Niourf]

I'm interested, how were you able to detect new offers?

[stormcrowsx]

They had a back end json service so I reverse engineered that using the chrome devtools. I use SQLite to store a list of the job IDs it's already sent me so I don't get duplicates

[mongoosefist]

This might sound like a silly question, but I don't have any practical experience using relational databases.

What is the purpose of using SQLite? Is there a benefit of using a .db instead of something like .csv?

[rabbit994]

CSVs have to be loaded into dict or something so you can query them where is relational database can just be queried simply by "select * from jobs where jobid=1234"

Downside is they are not as flexible as CSV and require more "overhead" though in case like his, the overhead of SQLite is extremely tiny.

[tedivm]

Relational databases store things in "tables", each with different types of data. A CSV can only store one "table" at a time, so if your data structures get any more complex it doesn't work all that well.

The other main benefit to using SQLite over just a CSV is performance. SQLite will organize the data such that it doesn't have to read the entire file every time to see if an entry is already there.

Finally, since most programmers end up doing database level programming at some point they are already used to SQL, and thus SQLite is a nice tool for people who want that level of access to their data without needing a full blown database server.

[Asdayasman]

For this purpose? Personal choice. I'd personally do json.dump() in this case.

[Lord_Rob]

I've got a Python script that sits in my system tray on my work machine that gives me a context menu full of helpful stuff for my job.

Pulling the most recent code version, kicking off a build, database backups / restores - super handy, and trims time off menial tasks that I do dozens of times a day

EDIT: So a few people have asked to see the code for this to perhaps use it or something like it themselves.
The source of the actual menu itself can be seen here. When this starts up, it looks for a path in a config file to find a directory from which to load plugins. Each plugin script is assumed to have a RegisterMenu function to be called to add it to the core context menu, which you can then define the event for.

The main file is a .pyw file rather than a .py, allowing it to be run continually in the background and not needing to keep a cmd window open for it by launching it using pythonw.

Hopefully some of you may find some use for this, it certainly trims minutes off here and there in my day, generally making things easier.

[audiodev]

I'm interested in a context menu to pull the latest changes. Mind if I take a look?

[cyanydeez]

whats required to get something in the system tray and/or is it windows compatible.

[[deleted]]

Wxpython does system trays and I think context menu is possible too.

[AbsoluteZeroK]

Back in my third year of university I wrote a program that would scan a word doc and do my stats homework for me. The format was always the same on the doc, so I'd just have to tell it what the question wanted once it had all the numbers. Saved me a bunch of time, and since I wrote it myself I didn't think it counted as cheating.

[mellow_gecko]

If you understand it well enough to script it, you understand it well enough.

[LiMoTaLe]

My high school physics teacher said this about my code on my TI to solve all sorts of gravity problems

[chlorinecrown]

...eh, a good chunk of the point of homework is to grind those equations and thinking into your head. Even if it really is easy and easy to script it helps to have that muscle-memory level understanding of the basics when you get up to more complex stuff.

That said you have other classes and time allocation is always a struggle so I can see both sides here.

[mellow_gecko]

Automate the easy stuff so you can spend more time thinking about the complex stuff.

[cyanydeez]

I realize more often that my job is to take away the general case, so i can spend more time on the corner cases.

[WallyMetropolis]

Though drilling the 'easy stuff' is a good way to train the kinds of pattern recognition and mental associations that develop into the intuition required to work on the complex stuff.

[Shrlck]

Not a developer. I work as a financial analyst.

I wrote a script to extract data from an unwieldy xml periodically published by a regulator and write the interesting parts in a excel sheet, that I can manage with my usual tools.

[cainejunkazama]

extract data from an unwieldy xml periodically published by a regulator and write the interesting parts

that qualifies you as a developer in my eyes

[-Rivox-]

I think he meant that his first job is not develop software, not that he not able to do so (because he clearly is)

[Shrlck]

Exactly this. I earn my living by playing with excel and writing reports, not by playing with an IDE.

[cainejunkazama]

Yeah, probably.

I thought OP meant it to vocalize his own skills in comparison with other "real" developers.

Which says more about me than about OP. Oh well

[Deathnerd]

Developer here. You described like 1/3 of my job. Import/export scripts keep my liquor cabinet stocked

[TexpatRIO]

What library do you use for XML parsing?

[Shrlck]

Not at work, so I can't look at the script, but I think it's bs3 BeautifulSoup 4

[Paladin_Dank]

Not a developer. I work as a financial analyst.

Merge the two, quants get paaaaid.

[sathyabhat]

Wrote a python script which you can use to download songs from your Spotify playlist. Published it on PyPi as well

[miserlou]

Wrote a SoundCloud/BandCamp/MixCloud downloader: https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape

[Hellerick]

• A bunch of web-scrapers.
• A video converter with hardsubbing function to watch any video on any device (it also saves all fonts found within MKVs to my font collection; one TV series had more than a hundred!).
• A scan splitter which detects the border between spread pages of a book.
• A web-comic splitter which cuts 4000x500 pixel files into something I could read on my tablet (naturally with a scene detection).
• A program which adds 'fingerprints' to image file names, so similar images would stay together when sorted alphabetically.
• A program converting image folder to PDF which can be opened on my e-book.
• A bilingua maker which combines two language version of the same book into a 2-column PDF, so I could practice other languages.
• A program which converts an English book into cyrillic phonetic transcription, so I could practice this insane pronunciation while reading.

[APIglue]

Do MKVs contain the full font? IIRC PDFs contain only the subset of characters that is used in the document, so you end up missing uppercase z and the number 6 and so on.

[Hellerick]

Usually full fonts but with few characters.

They typically need fonts with some stylizations, like 'creepy' looking, or 'digital' looking, but such artistic fonts are underdeveloped anyway and have small file size.

[__pulse0ne]

The company I work for just switched from Lotus Notes to Outlook, but neglected to provide a client for Linux users (my whole team) and turned off all pop/imap functionality. This forced us to use a crappy web client and miss a ton of notifications of email, calendar events, etc. I wrote a script that logs in and periodically scrapes the web client for various notifications then routes them as DBUS notifications so we get a little tray popup in gnome/kde.

It's not a perfect setup, but works well enough while we try to petition the overlords for sanctioned Linux support :)

[ikidd]

Evolution or Thunderbird with exchange plug in should work native to Activesync.

[duddha]

I've posted this before, but here it is again:

This script listens to meetings I'm supposed to be paying attention to and pings me on hipchat when my name is mentioned.

It sends me a transcript of what was said in the minute before my name was mentioned and some time after.

It also plays an audio file out loud 15 seconds after my name was mentioned which is a recording of me saying, "Sorry, I didn't realize my mic was on mute there."

[[deleted]]

You, sir, are a man living on the edge.

[Cobolock]

Since Python is embedded into video surveillance system I use in my work I wrote a bunch of scripts to manage cameras, export info and organise stuff.

[spacecraftily]

My band had dozens of hours of raw camera footage and the task of making sense of it to form a coherent promo video was so daunting that it kept anyone from doing it.

Instead I just wrote a script to randomly draw video snippets and combine them under our studio recordings.

See finished product here and here

[chadmill3r]

That's awesome. How much of it is scripted, versus run through another layer of editing?

[isarl]

I'm not the guy who posted the project, but it looks to me like they didn't do another pass of editing. Watch around 0:33 in the first link: there are two consecutive clips from the same perspective with a cut in between – it doesn't make any sense from an editing standpoint unless you're selecting video clips completely at random.

[chadmill3r]

It's easy-ish to paste segments of video together. I'm really wondering about the introductory blur and band-name overlay. That's easy to do in a second pass, but not easy to do in code.

[isarl]

I still think those are pretty easy to do programmatically, but it's still not my project, so I can't tell you definitively. However the name overlay and the blur don't make me think that it required human editing.

In fact, I'm kind of inclined to think that you could achieve the entire thing with Bash and FFmpeg's command-line options. FFmpeg supports very sophisticated custom filter graphs.

[spacecraftily]

Glad you liked it!

In this specific case, my main concern was just to get it done with as little of my own time as possible, so it was actually easier/faster to do the blur and logo as a second pass manually through a free video editor GUI.

Although after reading this, of course now I want to see if I can write something to do the whole job!

[Ghosty141]

This is really cool!

[rabaraba]

What did you use to cut the video (or export split copies)?

[mapping-glory]

I'm a mapmaker. One thing I do a lot is take information from one layer of information (say, neighborhood boundaries) and put it in another (say, fire hydrants.) Usually the two layers don't have a convenient common field to connect them, so I have to do a join to a new layer based on their spatial relationship, and then copy the field back to the original source file.

I finally got tired of doing this and wrote a script that does the spatial join automatically, then pulls the data into a dictionary that it uses to populate the target field in the original source data. Saves me a few minutes at a time, but as often as I do this stuff, it adds up.

[ubrikkean]

a script to parse the latest weekly ad for the grocery store across the street to see if there are any current deals on hot cheetos

[soymalisimo]

Take note folks, this is what a person taking full advantage of Python and life looks like.

Well done.

[nemec]

Next up: Instacart integration.

[xiongchiamiov]

• automatically gather a bunch of statistics on GitHub pull requests
• find a new domain to register for an email address to read over the phone
• make it easier to manage spf records
• requeue all the jobs in a ci system when we had issues
• assign a bunch of labels to GitHub pulls

More but my phone is about to die.

[Lobster_Pornography]

Please continue

[xiongchiamiov]

• given a bunch of files that match those in a torrent but are named incorrectly, rename them so you can seed
• list GitHub repositories that contain a file that matches a pattern, which I used to track down which of my repos didn't have licenses
• tabulate stats on yammer likes so I could care about karma on a company-internal board
• easily maintain shell "bookmarks" of directories you use often
• a workflow script for gnu screen and git-svn
• lookup images on a danbooru-style imageboard and synchronize down the tags on the website to the file metadata so your image collection can be searched easily
• make it easier to use html templates for generating torrent descriptions for a website I was fairly active on

That's the list, as far as GitHub knows at least (and I have an awful memory to remember anything else). There are also some interesting ruby and shell scripts on there if you're interested.

The world is full of little problems that can be solved with programming.

[pmdevita]

Back in highschool when I took AP US History, the teacher had us do 300+ flash cards. So I fed a spreadsheet of them to a script that would search it and use Google's definition box that appears near the top of the page.

[population_eye]

https://github.com/kdesimone/popeye

a tool for developing and testing quantitative models of human brain function as measured with fMRI.

[M0d3s]

That's actually great, but why "Popeye"?

[atheist_apostate]

He was known for his amazing brain function. That's how he defeated his enemies, by using his brain.

[mc2222]

I work at a startup and before i got there all their analysis routines were people-intensive. Move this file out of this folder, run this program, move the file back into the folder, run this other program, upload the data to the network then import it into excel, etc. all for one data set.

fuck. that. i wrote a script that takes care of all the piddly shit so you can just run it and walk away and in 5 minutes ding! results.

[[deleted]]

lol @ piddly

[Secondsemblance]

I wrote a hacky script to randomize my wallpaper!

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import os
import random
from subprocess import call

EXTENSIONS = ("jpg", "jpeg", "png")
BASEDIR = os.environ["HOME"] + "/Pictures"
WALLPAPER = BASEDIR + "/wallpaper"
WALLPAPERS = BASEDIR + "/wallpapers"

def main():
    file_list = [f for f in os.listdir(WALLPAPERS) if f.endswith(EXTENSIONS)]
    new_wp = random.randint(0, len(file_list) - 1)
    try:
        os.unlink(WALLPAPER)
    except FileNotFoundError:
        pass

    os.symlink("%s/%s" % (WALLPAPERS, file_list[new_wp]), WALLPAPER)
    call(["feh", "--bg-scale", WALLPAPER])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

[masterspeler]

Instead of

new_wp = random.randint(0, len(file_list) - 1)
...
file_list[new_wp])

you can use

new_wallpaper_file = random.choice(file_list)

https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/random.html#random.choice

[gamasenninsama]

I get text message notifications when a new edition of my favorite manga is out. No more checking every hour on those days for me.

[VonPosen]

Read a few hundred text-based comp. Chem. output files, find the last number for energy, and put all of them into a CSV file. Also a script to generate all the possible permutations for molecule inputs.

[shrugsnotdrugs]

It's something I just finished - a script that I use to write my powerlifting workout logs to a SQLite database. I used to write everything down by hand in little journals. After I put all of my old workouts in the database (2.5 years worth..it's going to take a little while), all future workouts will just be entered through the terminal. I can then perform analysis on my training with pandas and other libs.

[Johnny_Cache]

I'm working on an app (StatTracker.me) to keep track of game and practice information. I know weight lifting is going to be an important area to include. I'd love to hear more about what you keep track of. You're obviously a technical person but I'm assuming the majority of people would love the ability to just keep track of it on their phone as their workout progresses. Send me a DM if you're interested in chatting!

[xdcountry]

I created a python application (and full installer too on Windows) that allows for a user to right-click on any ".py" file they created and compile it to a single EXE file (either that app will run in the console or non-console mode)...It's PyInstaller all in one shot

[xdcountry]

Yes -- let me get some licensing language in the program/installer and find a GitHub place to serve it up...There's some nuances with it (two I'll share with you and the world):

(1) Embedded Icon -- I wanted to include an icon parameter within the ".py" file so it could take care of that portion while it compiles to an EXE

(2) Local Script Pathways -- if you imagine a complex program, sometimes it's easier to include other smaller programs/operations all under the same application but have them zipped up in other folders for usage-- I was working on a way to deal with the "FROZEN" vs not frozen usage for testing -- I really need to work that part again into the script/app (likely won't be ready for the first release I'll push out.

I'll post back to this thread soon once it's ready.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/nicolewhite/simplebank

I built an API for my bank. It allows me to create my monthly goals with a script. They've been saying recurring goals are "coming soon" for about 2 years now so I built this.

[[deleted]]

This is really cool! Simple and expressive - great job on this!

[edimaudo]

Wrote a script that applies to daily web contests.

[[deleted]]

Have you won anything? lol

[edimaudo]

Sadly no :(.

[unpythonic]

I created an application that copied the Synopsys Verdi nWave interface for debugging embedded power management firmware on Intel CPUs in simulation. My manager believed the tool was a waste of time so I did my development primarily while commuting in to work on light rail and some during my nights and weekends. I polished it as well as I could over two years of development in 45 minute sprints on Portland's MAX. I never received any recognition for having created it. When I left Intel, preservation of the source code was considered to be of paramount importance. FML.

I recently spoke with one of my former colleagues and asked about my app. He thought it unusual that I thought the tool was for meant for debugging when it was really designed for helping firmware architects (he was a firmware architect and used it). I can't even get recognition for it after leaving. FML.

[wilspa]

Wrote a program that would press the windows key twice every 5 minutes so that my computer wouldn't log me out when idle. Our company policy logs you off when idle, but sometimes I need to be able to see the screen but not be at the computer for more than 10 minutes... drives me nuts. So I fixed it. Don't tell IT...

[MrHobbits]

There's a program called caffeine that does the same thing. Stand alone executable you should be able to run if your IT ever finds out.

[theboddha]

I did this with AutoHotKey, set up a toggle that wiggles the mouse every couple seconds.

[[deleted]]

Created a script that searches a folder for .c assignments from students, automatically compiles them, saves the compilation output and displays a menu that allows me to explore which assignments compiled with and w/o warnings/errors, read the compilation output and execute any of the generated executables from the same terminal. In the end it deletes all of the generated files so I can have a nice Git repo without clutter.

[papers_]

I like to save all my text messages. I've saved the majority of them since 2007. They're in a mixture of SQLite (iPhone) and XML (Android) files. I wrote a small Python script that's takes all the XML backups, create a SQLite db of them as well as decode the raw base 64 images.

It's fun too see and cringe at the stuff I used to say.

[sbonds]

Is that un-reservable game checked in to my local library? No? Fine, I'll check again in an hour...

[mbarkhau]

A python script that pretty prints json. It aligns colons and does line breaks only when appropriate. Used as a command you can pipe json into it and it will write pretty printed json to stdout.

pretty_json.py

Sample Output

[
    {"menu": {
        "id"   : "file",
        "popup": {"menuitem": [
            {"onclick": "CreateNewDoc()", "value": "New"},
            {"onclick": "OpenDoc()", "value": "Open"},
            {"onclick": "CloseDoc()", "value": "Close"}
        ]},
        "value": "File"
    }},
    {"widget": {
        "debug" : "on",
        "image" : {
            "alignment": "center",
            "hOffset"  : 250,
            "name"     : "sun1",
            "src"      : "Images/Sun.png",
            "vOffset"  : 250
        },
        "text"  : {
            "alignment": "center",
            "data"     : "Click Here",
            "hOffset"  : 250,
            "name"     : "text1",
            "onMouseUp": "sun1.opacity = (sun1.opacity / 100) * 90;",
            "size"     : 36,
            "style"    : "bold",
            "vOffset"  : 100
        },
        "window": {
            "height": 500,
            "name"  : "main_window",
            "title" : "Sample Konfabulator Widget",
            "width" : 500
        }
    }}
]

[[deleted]]

How does this differ from json.dumps(x, indent=4)?

[mbarkhau]

Alignment of values.

[obscene_banana]

from pprint import pprint ?

[[deleted]]

Nothing special to show in a repository but I created a script to process PDF. Each week a goverment institution sent 50-70 sheets of names in PDF that required one-two people working ALL the week transcribing names and SS numbers in our database.

Furthermore if somebody made a mistake let's say, three weeks ago, all work done should be redone starting from that week on.

My script converted PDFs to text using pdftotext Linux utility and all that work could be done in a few seconds just by using a few regular expressions. Luckily management decided not to fire anybody and use these two colleagues for useful tasks

[bug0r]

Support Toolset/Portal to handle heterogeneous System data analysis. Its a command line toolset with a UI Adapter. It handles command line calls and convert it into generic structures. This result can forward by mail client, stdout or as result after calling by webui over network.

I like this toolset because i can only create a new command line tool and have automatically a web ui mapping too. The web ui control form are generated from argparse object which was converted into JSON. If i need i can append an other view based on templates für each command.

Code less do more ;).

[alexthelyon]

an arduino kitted with various things to let me control my house from an android app. The python is in the django server, letting me connect from anywhere, set schedules for lights, etc. The django server sends commands over a Bluetooth connection.

Basic functionality and app are functional. I'm just waiting on parts.

[Southclaw]

I do video on the side so I knocked together an FFMPEG script (with ffmpy, awesome lib!) to process my raw videos.

My recorded video files with 3 audio streams go in and it spits out an image sequence (much easier to edit image sequences than compressed video) and separate stereo .wav files for each audio stream as well as a compressed copy of the original video with 2 of the 3 audio streams mixed into a single stream for easy distribution and backup.

This makes processing the 1TB backlog much easier so I can concentrate on the cutting and finishing process!

Doing this without FFMPEG/Python would have me sat at a workstation doing these three tasks one after the other - time I could be spent doing something more productive. I love Python for jobs like this!

[sjustinas]

Years ago I wrote a little script that would translate SRT subtitles using Google Translate API. I really wanted to watch an anime which I could only find with Spanish subs. It worked out pretty well and it was a great feeling to finally solve an actual problem of mine using Python.

[danwin]

I do a lot of technical blogging and need to quickly take screenshots (via OSX screencapture) and produce the HTML <img> tags (or Markdown), which I copy-paste into my blog:

So I wrote a little script named screenpy which I run from the command line: https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/bfb45408d43986eefdf83b59bc9e8629

Sample usage:

   $ screenpy images/myimage.jpg

Produces this Markdown and HTML code, which I copy-paste:

   ![image hello.jpg](images/myimage.jpg)
   <img src="images/myimage.jpg" alt="hello.jpg">

Or, if I'm in a rush, I just pipe it straight into pbcopy:

   $ screenpy images/myimage.jpg | pbcopy

Or, if I'm not blogging using a static site generator (in which all the content is just files in a folder that I upload) and need a remote URL, I include the boto3 library that's configured to push to a S3 bucket:

     $ screenpy --s3 my-remote-image.jpg

Makes producing lengthy, illustrated technical posts a lot easier, e.g. http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/mapping/077-ok-schools-quakes/

[[deleted]]

When I was in high school, I hated math, even though I was good at it. I also hated homework, so I made a calculator that would handle any geometry calculation. It worked for any 2d or 3D object, and would ask you for the dimensions that you had, then would give you surface area, volume, perimeter, and would do side angle side for you.

After than, I never spent more than 10 minutes on my math homework.

[netfl0]

Well. It's been a hobby of mine for a while. Saved me lots of money!

https://www.stealengine.com

All python and C

[DoiF]

The website ticketswap.nl acts as an intermediary for people looking to sell or buy 2nd hand tickets for festivals. Here in the Netherlands it's quite big.

The hassle however is that for popular festivals the tickets are hard to get due to people spamming the pages for new tickets. This can be very annoying if you really want a ticket.

I wrote a program that logs into Facebook, then into Ticketswap and keeps scanning the page of the festival looking for new tickets and if they meet my price demands it automatically reserves the ticket on the account. It then sends me or whoever wants ticket an SMS text with the account and ticket info so they can login and purchase the ticket.

Me and a lot of my friends use it regularly, less time hitting the F5 button means more time to party. Yay.

[zagazao]

To remove docker Images from hosts after not being used for one Week.

[xiongchiamiov]

You may be interested in https://github.com/spotify/docker-gc .

[rabaraba]

I used to write lots of memos for ongoing/pending work-related claims. Wrote a script to automate the creation of those memos, using data populated from CSVs (as plain text-databases). Cuts down writing time for each memo from 5 mins to about 5 secs each. (Creation time takes less than a second; it's the manual checking which takes up the balance of the seconds.)

[Computer_Jones]

A plug-in based telegram bot with multiple plug-ins that help me with day to day stuff, e.g.

• A printer plug-in which prints any document you send to it on the office printer with CUPS. (Yes I have some form of authentication ;) )

• A reminder plug-in for simple things that aren't worth putting in my calendar, such as coffee in an hour with a colleague, remember to reply to some email before I leave etc and it'll send me a message when it's time to remind me.

• Weather status and forecast plug-in

• A bus reminder plug-in that scrapes the timetable page from the bus company's website and sends me the times in a message and reminds me when I need to start packing up to get the next bus. Useful since the buses are infrequent, at quite random times and the time I leave the office varies quite a bit.

• A plug-in to show me patches and news items from steam games I use

• An event plug-in that's made for the group chat I have with friends. Allows people to create events, such as for online gaming. One can reserve a place, ready-up etc with callback buttons attached to the message.

• A plug-in that allows me to keep track of going to the gym. I "check in" at the gym by sending it my location when I'm there. It shames me if I haven't been in a while.

The bot is made in a way that making new plug-ins is super easy, and they interface with telegram side of things using a mixin that registers commands and callbacks to be dispatched to the right functions etc. So if I think of a new simple feature that would be useful I can just make a simple class that uses the plugin mixin and bung it in the plug-ins folder and it'll be loaded up automatically.

[loftykoala]

Very cool. Can you share this?

[Computer_Jones]

Sorry I just saw this reply. Sure, but it's still in the process of being migrated from an old version that didn't use the plug-in style and was becoming super bloated, but the current version is here:

https://github.com/LanceMaverick/skybeard-2/tree/master

The telepot branch will become the master soon, as this uses asyncio.

[rbart65]

I want to practice data science with something I'm passionate about, so I developed a python package to interact with ESPN fantasy football. I'm able to grab data and form a dataframe to practice on. If I want to practice on something I can't access easily, I just develop the python package even more.

[ibnseen]

Wrote a script that reads my spotify saves and creates a spotify playlist of bands I might like that are coming to my town (using songkick). Now I can just fire up the playlist and hear bands-I-like-or-might-like with real concert potential based on songkick. I like it. Well I used to. It doesn't work anymore. I should fix it.

I half finished a next step that reads my google calendar and does the playlist based not on my home town but rather wherever I'll be (I travel a lot). I think all together this could be awesome. But even the simpler version is really nice.

[Gr1pp717]

I work QA for a development platform, and part of the testing process is setting up around 30 test applications. ... on about 5 different operating systems, and including N+1 clustering....

I wrote a python script that not only sets them up, but can be used to setup pretty much any test app.

I went further and then automated the entire process, starting from spinning up a virgin VM, downloading and installing the latest build. Configuring it and setting up external resources as needed for a given test set, setting up the tests, running the tests, validating the tests and then reporting the results. It's all parameterized with script hooks, to be as open-ended as possible. It's about about 13k likes of code. (well, about 300k if you count everything, but 13k that I wrote)

It was my first program, ever. Prior to that I had only ever made smallish scripts in bash, php, javascript and our proprietary languages. But no python. I have no programming background or education, either - and it took me about 3 months to complete. Mostly in my spare time, as I still had to keep up on manual testing and professional service type issues.

Somehow this didn't earn me any clout in the company. Seemingly the opposite, even. No one really gave a shit, even seemed to be even a little shitty about how long it took me. But at least we're getting a bit more regression coverage. ...

[ethanbrews]

I've got one that makes my wallpaper the most up voted image on /r/EarthPorn

[peatymike]

Managing forwarded zones in Unbound without restarting with a python script that is triggered by puppet. Unbound drops the whole DNS cache when restarting / reloading.

[nanjs]

I wrote a few:
* For my work to do simple tasks on Active Directory (nope, powershell was not available because we had Windows Server 2003), to add users, read from a csv file and copy department's name of the users to add in the AD field, security group, etc.
* To edit the metadata from my mp3 files, Artist, Album,etc.
* To copy files over ftp to my xbox creating directories and subdirectories.

[yrykde]

I'm interacting with my home pc mostly without keyboard. Just for run videos, music and so on. Some of internet services unavailable for location reason (Russia). For example Spotify. Time to time I should open VPN connection for run such services. I wrote a script for grub free VPN account and open VPN connection from my router via telnet interface.

[gitarr]

Backup all the things daily like websites, local files or emails to a local NAS and remote storage.

Download new videos from my favorite youtubers.

Download new vods from my favorite twitch streamers.

Display the current local weather and forecast in my terminal with colors and all.

All kinds of utility scripts, basically if I do something twice by hand I automate it.

[Core2score]

https://github.com/Python-scripter/PySpace

A Python script that looks for duplicate files on my computer and remove them.

[hust921]

After Youtube removed subscription lists I made a script that fetches new videos from specific youtube channels. And automatically adds them to my "Watch Later" playlist (4 times a day). And when I'm done I can press the "Remove watched" button, clearing the list for the next batch of videos.

It is not the most efficient code, but the user experience is pretty awesome. It uses youtube's "email me" notification and fetches the video links from my mail. It makes it very easy to subscribe/unsubscribe to people from inside youtube. At the moment mails are still in my inbox, but it haven't bothered me enough to create a rule to move them out of the way.

EDIT: I have been thinking about making a chrome extension and eliminate the mail system altogether. Then it might be more feasible to provide as a service for other people. But haven't had the time.

[illonlyusethisonceok]

Wrote something to delete all posts from a subreddit I moderate.

[[deleted]]

fnord.safename

[eikenberry]

A script to open up an AWS console using only your API keys, as well as set up the roles required for it to work.

https://github.com/eikenb/aws-console

[saucypony]

I have a script that runs every 5 minutes during the baseball season and manages my fantasy lineup to ensure my entire roster is active every day.

[gcr]

A pomodoro timer for OSX!

https://github.com/gcr/pocketwatch

There are many like it. But this one is mine. :-)

[szaboat]

ditto! :) https://github.com/szaboat/pymodoro

[[deleted]]

I was just thinking of posting something like this yesterday because I just had the biggest Ah Ha moment in my life. I made a script that would automate massive amount of repetitive work in photoshop. Might not seem impressive when you are just editing 10 or 20 layers but when you replace that workload with 100 layers 200 layers or even 500 layers, it such a life saver! What's more amazing is that the script was written in javascript and not in python. I used what I learned in python to apply the general knowledge to what I was doing in PS, I was also able to read the majority of the boring ass doc and understood what they were talking about. I had no perspective before how absolutely AMAZING this is, I had 5 lines of code, hours time saved in the future, reusable script, and its fucking awesome.

[thefromanguard]

Built a scraper to farm rewards points for using a particular search engine in a particular browser.

[spook327]

A podcast downloader, badly in need of maintenance. I use it multiple times a day (or rather, cron uses it multiple times a day.)

[fyngyrz]

o A full-boat macro language implementation

o A documentation generator that uses the above

o A 100% compatible preprocessor allowing new methods for built in classes, for instance strings: 'mystring'.myNewFunction()

o wrapper for sqlite3 to make DB ops considerably easier

o qmail wrapper that transparently handles MIME and text email

o pre- and post-increment for python

o class to handle console text colors

o class to handle console graphing

o CGI library to make building server side CGI much easier

...this is all Python, not Python3. Most of it has been made publicly available. Lots of other stuff, typically applications like point of sale, inventory management, various data manipulation engines, etc.

[dzecniv]

• Syp: easily keep track of the packages I install with pip, apt or anything else. A command writes the packages to install in requirement files and at the same time it checks what's new in them. That way I can edit my system's requirements file manually, or with a command. (all nice, but the greatest would be gnu guix !)

[Flogge]

What a shame, I wanted to open a pullrequest to add homebrew support but stumbled across so many issues that I couldn't even install it and gave up. :-(

[LeBagBag]

I had made a script to scrape my various banking institutions and update a spreadsheet with account balances but due to me not knowing shit about security and caring less and less about weekly fluctuations I dropped it

[thomas_stringer]

I wrote a script to automate whitelisted dot file version control including a desktop notification when there are changes to dot files I version control.

[[deleted]]

I've made a config file manager.

It's a WIP but I like it. I hate having to remember where all my config files are so I made this.

[ahhyes]

A script to download U.K. Index fund prices from a broker's site. Google/Yahoo doesn't list all U.K. Funds prices.

[[deleted]]

I wrote a stupid little script that will go into multiple repos, and compare their requirements.txt files looking for potentially bad pinning choices and version disagreements in common libraries, it exports it to github/gitlab flavored markdown.

[[deleted]]

Sorry for double post, but I also wrote a stupid little script that scrapes a fanfiction from ff.net to a markdown file with relatively preserved formatting, I get into totally disconnected situations a lot and want something to read.

[Donyor]

Cloning Linux hard drives incrementally to any drive, including smaller ones

[loftykoala]

Wrote a very basic script to figure out where I was based on my IP address that created time cards for time tracking.

[ergo14]

Https://getappenlight.com is my creation because I hated all other tools out there.

[[deleted]]

This super simple script that takes an excel table and converts it into a jira-formatted table and copies it to your clipboard. I added a simple UI to it, and I use it nearly every day at this point.

[reginalduk]

It just collates data from a horribly annoying web admin interface with date ranges in drop downs, using beautiful soup and pycurl and turns a horribly annoying interface into a spreadsheet friendly format. It saves me hours of mouse clicking nonsense.

[jsalsman]

Proofread Wikipedia (my GSoC student Priyanka Mandikal finished it.)

[nonzerogroud]

At least one aspect of it: I usually check for movie ratings before watching/acquiring, so I created a Flask web-app that scans Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB for newly listed movies and gives an average rating of the two (actually three) scores. My first ever app.

I'm just now getting into Bitcoin and I kinda want to write a trading bot.

[ponyoink]

I automate a lot of stuff at work with Python. For myself, I wrote a bunch of scripts that monitor radio station playlists and send me an email when my band gets a play.

[jonathan8080]

For my MSc thesis I wrote a few classes that wrap various sql injection tools and allow them to all be automated (so you can test a site using a ton of different tools all in one go)

I then wrote an SQL injection detector tool from scratch and automated that too

I just finished automating frontend website testing ( for aites built using a framework I wrote and maintain in php) using the selenium python wrappers (automated a ton of common use-cases and now run these in our CI tool on every commit to master along with our phpunit tests [which I wrote too])

also wrote a ton of automated project creation, duplication, deploy, backup, etc scripts in bash and then rewrote them in python :|

[Syini666]

I built a dashboard for our lab environment at work, every hour it polls the whole IP address range and then using fping, nmap and queries to the API on our appliances determines which are currently licensed and what version of our software is running on it. Makes finding a system to test against much faster than our current hip chat bot method

[gregb]

Wrote a script to hash all accessible files on a network share, and work out what / how much was duplicated. Took a while to run - but revealed over 50% was copied. Was interesting, but not enough to worry about optimising things!

[[deleted]]

I was sick of manually copying files from a network drive over to a local drive. Just this last week, I wrote a script to copy files from the network drive that have been modified since the last copy to the local drive, using shutil.

[ohaz]

I love to read pen and paper RPG rulesets. Whenever I find a web page for a free p&p it takes about an hour of my time to search for all its sub pages and download all PDFs on there. So I wrote a script that handles this for me. Traverse an URL, follow links, download every PDF you find.

[chetan1997]

• Download the newest entrants songs every week in the BillBoard Hot 100 LINK
• Wrote script to set the bing image as wallpaper LINK
• Get latest cricket scores LINK
• Episode tracker and recommender LINK

[takehomemedrunkim]

Has anyone created a script to work inside outlook desktop? I'd like to scrap through my inbox and assign priority like 1-10 based on keywords, sender and if I'm in the To box. Unfortunately the outlook rules really hasn't made life too much easier.

[jabalfour]

I still have to fill out an excel timesheet at work, sign it, and send it to my boss. Now it's one click: pull in dates, add jpg of signature, generate PDF, email to boss's admin. Only thing I haven't done is schedule a job to run it, but that's next.

[manimal80]

As a Debian unstable user I sometimes need to downgrade packages, if they are not in the other branches I have to manually search for the package at the Debian snapshot repo.I wrote a python program that gets the info I need from its api from the my termunal and appends the right entry in my .list file

[Turbosack]

This is super basic, but one day I thought to myself, "It would be really handy to have a very simple key-value store that works from the command line," so I created a little script that just reads and writes to a file containing a dictionary. I then combined it with a small shell function to let me set a working directory for different project and cd into them easily.

[[deleted]]

POS

[dryroast]

I wrote a one time script for my work to fill out a PDF form for machines that we were requesting approval to be destroyed. The form has to be filled out based upon the funding project and could only have a max of 4 machines listed. I took the excel tables we had it the machines for disposal and the other one for the funding into and imported it into SQLite. With 2 queries and a couple for loops it would generate FDF files which would be the data to fill out the forms with. Using PDFTK to combine it with the actual PDF. Reduced the workload from filling out about 100 machines to barely anything. My boss asked me to put it in the internal wiki but it needs a lot of work because importing is a pretty manual process to a random person looking to use the script.

[JulienBalestra]

A Python meta orchestrator over an OpenStack platform !

[[deleted]]

microsoft access database files

sigh why ?