Apple's T2 Security Chip gets itself in the way as much as possible when attempting to install Linux on a Mid 2019 Macbook Pro and a lot of the available documentation for Linux-on-the-mac online is pre-T2. After quite a bit of back and forth and eventually finding the right resources I managed to get Ubuntu installed on my MacBook Pro with everything working... except the microphone.

A user attempting to install Baby Buddy submitted an interesting issue with the following error during the pipenv install process:

THESE PACKAGES DO NOT MATCH THE HASHES FROM Pipfile.lock!. If you have updated the package versions, please update the hashes. Otherwise, examine the package contents carefully; someone may have tampered with them.
    docopt==0.6.2 from https://www.piwheels.org/simple/docopt/docopt-0.6.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl#sha256=0340515c74203895f92f87702896e45424bf51dc71bf15b4748450f50be04346 (from -r /tmp/pipenv-vf5_eub9-requirements/pipenv-k7_dvsro-requirement.txt (line 1)):
        Expected sha256 49b3a825280bd66b3aa83585ef59c4a8c82f2c8a522dbe754a8bc8d08c85c491
             Got        0340515c74203895f92f87702896e45424bf51dc71bf15b4748450f50be04346

Hash checking and Pipfile.lock are a part of the pipenv toolchain and meant to verify the integrity of packages being installed. Committing the lock file is recommended practice and generally something I have not had many problems with. There are some old tickets on GitHub reporting issues with this hashing between operating systems, but the latest versions of pipenv supposedly do not have these problems.

Why is this user getting a hash match error? I had a Pi lying around, so I decided to try replicating the issue. Many hours later, I got Baby Buddy up and running on my (second) Pi and learned a lot about the Python packaging process and how …

This post is part of the series, Advent of Code 2017, where I work my way through (part of) the 2017 Advent of Code challenges in order to re-learn some of the basics of Python and reflect on some simple concepts and functionality. All my challenge code is available in cdubz/advent-of-code-2017 on GitHub.

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

positions = [...]
movements = [...]
possibilities = [positions]
while True:
    positions = move(positions, movements)
    if positions in possibilities:
        break
    possibilities.append(positions)

This post is part of the series, Advent of Code 2017, where I work my way through (part of) the 2017 Advent of Code challenges in order to re-learn some of the basics of Python and reflect on some simple concepts and functionality. All my challenge code is available in cdubz/advent-of-code-2017 on GitHub.

  \ n  /
nw +--+ ne              sw +--+ nw
  /    \                \ /    \ /
-+      +-    ---->    s +      + n
  \    /                / \    / \
sw +--+ se              se +--+ ne
  / s  \

This post is part of the series, Advent of Code 2017, where I work my way through (part of) the 2017 Advent of Code challenges in order to re-learn some of the basics of Python and reflect on some simple concepts and functionality. All my challenge code is available in cdubz/advent-of-code-2017 on GitHub.

0
1
2
3
4

>>> d = {0: 1, 2: 5, 3: 4}
>>> max(d)
3  # This is the *maximum value of …

This post is part of the series, Advent of Code 2017, where I work my way through (part of) the 2017 Advent of Code challenges in order to re-learn some of the basics of Python and reflect on some simple concepts and functionality. All my challenge code is available in cdubz/advent-of-code-2017 on GitHub.

0
1
2
3
4

digits = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
total = 0
for a, b in zip(digits[::1], digits[1::1]):
    if a == b:
        total += a

I taught myself Python a few years ago by following the wonderful Learn Python the Hard Way (LPTHW) series by Zed A. Shaw. Since then, I have spent a decent amount of time in Python largely in the Django framework. Django is a lot of fun to work with because it abstracts away much of the complexities of developing a full-featured web application in Python. In this way, however, it has also led me to forget some of the basic Python that I learned through LPTHW.

In order to recapture some of those early lessons (and maybe learn a few more Python 3 specific ones), I worked through (part of) the 2017 Advent of Code, a 25-day, language agnostic programming challenge series developed by Eric Watsl. I originally thought about using the series to learn a new language, but eventually realized that I still have a long way to go in Python.

This series explores my (often very basic) revelations and lessons learned while completing 20 of the 25 days of challenges (vacation travel cut the series short for me). The code I used for each day is available on GitHub. Also check out the advent-of-code and advent-of-code-2017 GitHub topics …

Back in April, I learned about Timestrap, a self-hostable, Django-based time-tracking project from a post on HackerNews by Isaac Bythewood. As I have been learning Python in the past year or so, I reached out to Isaac and started contributing to the project. After getting familiar with the core application, I turned my attention to testing and eventually found my way to Selenium, a collection of browser automation tools used for frontend testing.

I had never worked with Selenium or other automated testing products, so it struck me as a great opportunity to get my feet wet in something new. After getting things up and running, we quickly learned that the test results were quite inconsistent across development environments - even to a point that occasionally tests would succeed when run individually, but fail with the full test case.

After much trial and error, we have settled on a (mostly) consistent setup for testing with Selenium, Python and SauceLabs. This produces much better results than testing in development environments and crossing fingers during CI. Hopefully this primer will help others facing similar challenges (as we had a lot of trouble finding good material on the subject).

• Getting Started
  • Installing Chromedriver …

Having fallen behind a bit on Takeout Inspector, the 12 Years of Gmail series and some other projects, I decided to try to put something very simple together from beginning to end and actually launch it. One of my previous posts, Examining the Remnants of a Small DDoS Attack introduced me to the Python package ipwhois and the alternative WHOIS system RDAP. This eventually led me to a quick and simple project called RDAP Explorer...

This post is part of my series, 12 Years of Gmail, taking a look at the data Google has accumulated on me over the past 12 years of using various Google services and documenting the learning experience developing an open source Python project (Takeout Inspector) to analyze that data.

After taking a look at the chat data in my export, I am finally ready to move on to some of the actual mail! Much of what I will look at here is pretty similar to what I was able to turn up with chat data. I tried to branch out a bit, bringing in a new package to create word clouds, and also refactored some of the Takeout Inspector code to form the beginning of a more "formal" report generating process (instead of just spitting out a single HTML file with only a certain subset of the data). Hopefully I can continue to improve this to a point allowing for easier report generation for any user. Anyway, on to the mail data!

• Top 10 Recipients
• Top 10 Senders
• Thread Durations
• Thread Sizes
• Activity by Day of the Week
• Activity by Hour of the Day
• Label Usage
• Subject Word Cloud