I’m releasing new software today for solving crossword puzzles in the terminal. cursewords is a small Python program to open, navigate, and solve puzzles stored as .puz files. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you can install it today by running pip3 install –user cursewords in your terminal, and then use the cursewords command […]
Tag Archives: programming
Shutting down @LinkArchiver, the Twitter link backup bot
After a little over a year of service, @LinkArchiver, the Twitter bot that automatically made Internet Archive backups of the links you tweeted, has archived its last link. In that time it archived somewhere around 7.2 million links total from about 9,000 users.1“Quote tweets” are treated like links to tweets, and constituted about a third […]
Pulling free and open weather data
When I decided to add realtime weather effects to @choochoobot, I knew there were a few qualities I wanted to find in a data source. Ideally I would find something free and reliable that didn’t require me to agree to many developer terms or sign up for an API token. Google shuttered its undocumented Weather […]
Which states hated Wesley?
One of my goals while at Recurse Center has been to improve my ability to manipulate and visualize data sets. To that end, I’ve been toying around with the Social Security Administration’s baby name dataset, which records the number of babies born with each given name every year, both federally and at the state level. […]
New bot: @78_sampler, serving up old records
The Internet Archive hosts an incredible collection of over 25,000 professionally digitized 78rpm records. The great thing about a catalog that large is that, if you know what you want, you’re likely to find it. On the other hand, if you just want to browse it can be overwhelming and even intimidating. Each item could […]