Schweigi's Blog

Schweigi's Blog

Sign in Subscribe

Extracting URLs (faster) with Python

Extracting URLs (faster) with Python

The recommended approach to do any HTML parsing with Python is to use BeautifulSoup. It's a great library, easy to use but at the same time a bit slow when processing a lot of documents. In this blog post, I would like to highlight some alternative ways on

How to create a thumbnail API service in 5 minutes

In this blog article, I would like to show you how to develop an API service for creating thumbnails with AWS Lambda in less than 5 minutes. The service will accept pictures over a REST API and return the thumbnails using ImageMagick. In a second step, we are going to

Weather Station with Web UI

Weather Station with Web UI

Summer is here and because I like to know how hot it is outside I built a small weather station based on a Espruino Pico. The weather station has a built-in web UI to check the temperature from a computer or mobile phone. The UI is self-contained and hosted directly

A tiny nifty data logger

A tiny nifty data logger

In this week's blog post, I would like to show you how to make a data logger. Data loggers are fun to built and the logged data is useful to gain insights. For example to check the humidity in your apartment or to see the temperature profile. Hardware

Alarm-System the size of a USB stick

Alarm-System the size of a USB stick

Today I would like to show you how to build an alarm system with the size of a USB stick. There are a lot of advantages to this. It's so small it can be placed everywhere in a house. The components we use are cheap so it is

Espruino Pico: Javascript on a USB stick

Espruino Pico: Javascript on a USB stick

The Espruino Pico is a micro-controller which runs JavaScript and has the size of a small USB stick. I backed this project end of last year on Kickstarter [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gfw/espruino-pico-javascript-on-a-usb-stick] and this week I received my rewards. I have to say that the campaign was

How to use custom fonts in Heroku apps

I run PhantomJS [http://phantomjs.org/] in a Heroku [https://www.heroku.com/] app and use it to generate PDFs from a website. It works very well, but I noticed that Japanese texts are not rendered correctly in the generated PDFs. The reason is simple. PhantomJS uses the system fonts

How to use the PlayFramework asset pipeline

PlayFramework 2.3 comes with a nifty asset pipeline. In this article, I would like to give you a quick introduction. The asset pipeline processes all files which you reference with @routes.Assets.versioned(...). The pipeline uses plugins which are build on sbt-web [https://github.com/sbt/sbt-web]. There are

A plugin API for your Angular app

You might wonder do I really need plugins for my Angular app? When building Angular-Gantt [https://github.com/angular-gantt/angular-gantt] we had the same thoughts. But we run into problems when our library got bigger and bigger. Not everyone needs all the functionality and certain users would like to have

Make your own Assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 2)

Make your own Assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 2)

In part 1 [https://www.mschweighauser.com/make-your-own-assembler-simulator-in-javascript-part1/] we did create the CPU. In the second and final part, we gonna focus on the memory, console output, assembler and the UI. The memory We will use a simple array to represent the memory. Each slot contains a JavaScript numeric value.

Make your own Assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 1)

Make your own Assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 1)

I always enjoy developing in assembler because it is fairly simple to learn, each command does exactly one thing and thus gives a good insight on how a computer operates. Nevertheless, it is possible to make sophisticated software and there is the problem of developing in assembler. It can get