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  • Author Author: zengirl2
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Valentine's Pi - Epaper Love

zengirl2

 

Valentine's Day is almost here, and I'm doing some fast learning about Python in order to combine some programs for my display. I've got the Epaper display doing the Twitter monitor @LoveQuotes feed. Notice that the font was looking pretty small, but I was able to make some changes in size to the program so that it was easier to read. Then I merely watched the stream to see which font size worked best. I decided that it was better to be on the larger size and have more readability for average length quotes, rather than be small to include extra long quotes. After all, it is a short format form of media image. Hey, speaking of short format, did I mention that current style is one space after a period in sentences? I'm still doing two spaces, which I'll try to correct from now on! Sheesh, it's hard enough to stay current on all the social media, let alone the English language style changes!

 

imageimage

 

Okay, now I'm on the tricky part. I want to send a tweet to the stream using a special string that will result in a celebration -- like a personal message followed by a series of photographs of me and my husband. So far I've got the special string being identified and printed on the computer monitor, but now I'm on the part where I need the image files to be sent to the Epaper display. It could very well be that I get stuck on this, and I really want it to be done by Valentine's Day. So, if you are already on my contact list for this community, be ready for one of those coding911emails.  I'm off for another late night!

  • in reply to DAB

    DAB wrote:


    The new twitter language reminds me of my early programming days when everything was limited to six characters.

    It gave me a perfect excuse for my bad spelling as I just got into the habit of dropping vowels.  The words still made some sense, but I was so glad when computer languages allowed us to use real words and sentences.

    6 characters was very convenient.  You were also limited to UPPER CASE.  This meant you could fit letters plus digits into 6 bits, so you could fit a six-character name into a single 36-bit word, say on a Univac 1100 series.

     

    PDP-11 was even more clever.  They had a coding called Radix-50 which fit 3 alphanumerics into 16 bits, or 6 alphanumerics in 32 bits  They encoded the letters + digit + a few punctuation marks into a number from 0-39.  Then they multiplied the 2nd and 3rd characters by 40 or 1600 and added the three characters to a max value of 63,999.  So why "Radix-50"?  Well, because everyone though in octal back then.

  • Hi Leslie,

     

    The new twitter language reminds me of my early programming days when everything was limited to six characters.

    It gave me a perfect excuse for my bad spelling as I just got into the habit of dropping vowels.  The words still made some sense, but I was so glad when computer languages allowed us to use real words and sentences.

     

    You are making great progress on your epaper display and your tie into to wireless.

    It looks like you are teaching this old dog new tricks. image

     

    I probably need to learn this new technology, but finding time is really tough.

     

    Thanks

    DAB

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John,

    I laughed in a big way yesterday when I saw your French quote.  So appropriate given my new tidbit of knowledge about the French Spacing.  Thanks so much for telling me, and now I have a memory device that will help me retain it.  Oops, just did another double space...

  • I wouldn't worry about the spacing.  Use what you like.  I was taught to double-space after a period, and not doing it looks strange to me.  OTOH, I don't like extra spaces after colons and semicolons.  But it's my writing, and if someone doesn't like the way I formatted it they can go ahead and reformat.  Chacun a son goût.

     

    Speaking of which, a buddy of mine looked into this circa 1993 and discovered that the questionable practice of single spaces after a period is called "French spacing".  This caused him to remember a Mark Twain quote: "It's un-American, it's un-British... it's French."