Displaying python output with GeekTool

Living in Michigan, we are often hit with snow storms that cause us conditions to be too dangerous for driving to school.  These 'snowdays' are great, and every morning when the possibility of a snowday is present, I will often find myself checking our local news website to see if our schools name appears.  This often involves refreshing the website every few minutes (or even seconds! #fingercrossed) during the crucial minutes before I need to take a shower and get in the car or get back into bed.

So the other day when I was doing some web-scraping programming, the idea occurred to me to automate this process, so that I don't have to keep pressing refresh.  So I wrote a little python program that opened up the website, searched the html code for Kent county schools, and outputted the results.  This was the hard part, and one I'm not prepared to fully explain today.

Once I got the program printing what I wanted, I opened up GeekTool.  GeekTool is a mac program that allows you to display words, bits of code, website data, computer data, images, etc. on the background of your desktop.  You'll have to see for yourself various things it can do.

Anyhow, creating a shell geeklet with the following code will cause that python program to run and its output to show up on the computers desktop:

python ~/Documents/script/webscraper.py

In this case, webscaper.py was the name of the program I created -- but you could put the name of any python program there. Then one of the options you can set in GeekTool is how often this program refreshes itself, so I set mine for 60sec. The results:

For a half-hour this morning I sat and read the Bible, sipping coffee, and every 60secs or so looked up and watched as the list populated itself and grew automatically.  And, since you're reading this, eventually I did see my school's name pop up.  Unfortunately, the coffee had done its work and I couldn't fall back asleep.

By the way, the picture of the radar was also self refreshing -- every 300 seconds (5 minutes) GeekTools would fetch the image url, download the image and update my background.  

Apart from being able to be lazier than normal on a snowday morning, I will say there was an additional benefit to all this work.  By fetching it this way, I actually found out about my snowday 2 minutes faster than I would have otherwise (we receive text messages from remind), and my background was always a few schools ahead of the website the normal way through a browser and many schools ahead of perusing the website through their mobile app.

Next steps are to get my computer to check for my school, and automatically turn my alarm on/off based on whether the name shows up....    

Accessing Python Functions in Quicksilver

Over the last two years, I have been programming a lot with Python.  I have developed a lot of functions to do various mathematical tasks. For instance, I have a function that takes a number and spits out a list of its factors:

factors(30) = [1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, 30]

And I have another that gives me the prime factorization of a number:

primefactorization(400) = [2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5]

These have been very helpful as I have created other programs, and as I have participated in the EulerProject -- a set of mathematical challenges that typically require the user to create a program that helps solve them.  As I try to complete more and more challenges, my collection of useful functions grows and grows.

Recently, I have tried to find a way to access these functions more quickly.  Previously, I would have to find them in the correct program file, open it up, tweak it a little bit to call the function with the specifics of what I was looking for, and then run the program.  Annoyingly many steps, in my opinion, and usually hard enough to deter me from using my own work and find an answer another way, or give up entirely.

However, I found a way to use Quicksilver to access these functions, inspired by a friends QuicksilverPythonTodoList program. He uses Quicksilver, as I do, to easily find and open programs and files on the mac, to move and copy files, to create qr codes, to search google, and many other things.  And he uses it to call up a python program and add items to a todo list by a simple keyboard command.  By pressing Cmd-Space, period, typing his todo item, pressing tab, and enter, quicksilver automatically opens up the correct python program, enters in the correct input, the python script runs which updates a text file, which is automatically saved and displayed on his background via GeekTool. All in the background, instantly (practically), at the press of a few simple buttons.  I wanted that too, for my mathematical functions.

So I gathered all my functions into one python module which I called euler.py and reading Brian's post on adding custom actions to quicksilver I set out to enable this for myself.  It took three steps, which I'll outline for you if you're interested yourselves:

Step 0: Install quicksilver and learn how to use the period to enter text entry mode. 

1. Create a python module that has any desired functions all in one place.  Take note of the file name and path as you will need it later. Mine was ~/Documents/script/euler.py
2. Use terminal to access that file and call up a function.  I had to use a -c switch with python to access my functions.  Something like:
       python -c "import euler; print euler.factors(30)"
   This is essentially a two-line program that imports my list of functions, and calls one of them specifically.  
3. Write an applescript file that calls this terminal command.  In order for quicksilver to recognize it, you'll need to save this applescript file in ~/Library/Application Support/QuickSilver/Actions and then restart QS.  I created an applescript named DoMath.
   

Now I can access my files by the following keystrokes:

cmd space, period, type my functions name, tab, type domath, enter.

Having a heavy interest in cryptography, I also took many of the functions I wrote to encipher and decipher messages and set it up to be done the same way.  So now:

cmd space, period, CaesarShift("hello world") tab encoder instantly produces Khoor zruog.  

I have one improvement I'd like to do -- but not sure how to quite yet.  I'd like to be able to have it save the results to the clipboard automatically.  I'm sure that's possible with an additional tweak of the DoMath and Encoder applescripts -- but that's a learning project for another day.

Lesson Planning with Google Calendar

I've done lesson planning about a dozen different ways in my 10 years of teaching - and my favorite and current way of planning is by using the Calendar application. As you can see in the picture, each activity for a given day is one of the pink boxes that shows up. In these boxes (technically they are "events") I can write as little or as much detail as I want.  Typically I just write a little bit: "Notes on Solving by Quadratic Formula" for instance. For assignments I write something simple like "Assign: Pg 189 #1, 2, 10-26evens" or "Assign: Worksheet - Multiplication".

These calendars are super easy to move items around, copy from year to year, assign over multiple days, etc. I have created four Google calendars, one for each class that I teach. These Google calendars then can be embedded into my class website.  Then students and parents can know at a glance what were studying not only this week, but they can look forward to days when they may be gone, or look back to days they've missed.  I have had on more than one occasion students who have come in after being sick and instead of asking "did I miss anything" they hand me their homework which they found on the calendar.

Whenever possible, I put links to helpful material into these events as well. This was the biggest challenge, but something a little html knowledge proves handy for. To add a link to something, you double click on the event and type into the "Add a note" section. You may type text descriptions with more details here and students will be able to read these by clicking for more details on their calendars.  Adding URL's sounds easy at first, but unfortunately, simply pasting a link into the "Add URL" section doesn't work. Perhaps this will be fixed someday? A work around that allows a clickable link to appear on the student end of things is to use a little HTML code. Copy and paste following code snippit:
  <a href = "URLgoeshere">Text goes here</a>
One thing to look out for is to make sure that your computer doesn't turn " into "smart quotes" -- because then the links won't work. I had to turn "smart quotes" off in system preferences. In addition to downloadable worksheets as assignments, I include links to quizlet vocabulary practice, math practice websites like ThatQuiz, or videos of my lessons whenever they are available.  A colleague of mine records every lesson every day, and since this year we share Algebra 2 together, I include links to her videos on youtube. I tell the students that if they don't like the way I explain something, or if they need another explanation, they can check the calendar and find Mrs. Straayer's videos.

One last plug for planning with google calendars is that students and parents can subscribe to them, and then they can have them show up on either their computers or phones. Anytime I make an update, they will have access to the most up to date plans.  This is really convenient when a snow day or something arises -- I can simply cut and paste today's events to tomorrow.  I have mine connected to my phone so I can either see what's coming up from anywhere -- or add a note or link or change something from everywhere on my phone.

Welcome to the dark side -- here are your cookies...

...Aw man... why are they oatmeal raisin!? Gross!

So, I haven't written a ton in the last few months, because I've been a little overwhelmed.  Most of it was just normal, end-of-the-school-year busyness (business?) of trying to finish off four different classes and grade 140 exams.

But another overwhelming thing has been switching over to using a mac.  

You see, over spring break, my household computer died -- the hard drive completely crashed. Besides losing all my data, papers from classes, pictures and videos of our kids first two years of life, etc, it also meant I didn't have a way to work from home anymore. At the time, I was spending at least 10 hours a week doing something from home (mostly in the 4:30-6:00am time frame...).  Accomplishing this all at school would have been a difficult move.

Not sure if I agree -- it was just a cool picture

Fortunately, I was given a laptop to work with. The only thing was -- it was MacBook Pro. Our school is in the initial stages of a move toward 1:1 access (every student has their own computer) and the teacher's laptops had just come in. We were given our laptops with a simple suggestion: play with them.  Get familiar with them.  

I had no choice really, but to dive in pretty quickly. Fixing or replacing my windows machine was not in our financial budget, nor did my personal time budget have room to try to make repairs. So, I began doing everything I used to do on a brand new machine.

After 10 weeks, I can finally say that I like this new machine. I still find myself behaving at times as though I'm on a PC (I keep pressing "Alt F-S" to save something and otherwise trying to access the menubar) but I am getting used to many of the changes. I won't say that I like this machine better then a PC yet -- but at least I've stopped cursing under my breath as I use it. If I end up ever liking it better, it will probably be because of QuickSilver -- but that's another post for another day. 

More posts will follow, I promise -- but it's still slow going.