The eBook Shuffle

Remember when there were mini mp3 players with one button and a shuffle feature? If like many geeks you have a bunch of interesting ebooks from Humble Bundle, Oreilly or Github or wherever you get technical books, you probably have folders and folders of lots of interesting books. What if you want to “shuffle” or randomly pick one off your virtual bookshelf and read a bit while staying home? Today I’ll show how to virtually “grab a book off the shelf” of your collection with a simple Python script:

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Brain games

During lockdown in many cities it may be a good time to stay in and do some reading or video games. But what are some good games that can improve your mind during these challenging times? Here are a few suggestions:

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Online learning conferences

While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:

Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.

Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.

May you go fourth and program!

Update –

200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th

Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th

FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence

Today the Wordfence developers announced the new fastorslow.com tool, a handy tool for seeing how fast your site is in various parts of the world. The Wordfence folks build a quite useful plugin used by many sites – and this one – to keep reduce risk of attack.

This new tool however can be used to see the performance of any type of public site and recommendations on speeding it up. It also would be a much easier way to time requests to a server like in the World Network Requests Measurement post.

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New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START

The Repeater-START app now includes repeaters imported from the New England Repeater Directory. This makes the app and repeater listing much more useful to those in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine! This expands the repeater-START app and any other applications needing an offline, fairly complete listing of amateur radio repeaters worldwide.

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Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests

In Ian Stewart’s book, Professor Stewart’s Casbook of Mathematical Mysteries, he writes about an easy way one might prove that the earth is not flat. His “easy” proof can be done by booking some flights and timing them… or, simply looking up actual flights from certain cities to other cities. If it is much much shorter for a certain flight from A to D while A to B to C to D in a nearly straight line is much longer, it’s effectively a proof you can go around the world without falling off…

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