And now for something completely different... One of my hobbies is picking up trash. I never know if my code or my book writing is as good as it can be. Maybe there's some slight change that could make it run ten times faster or sell ten times as many copies. But an hour spent picking up trash is roughly as optimized as it can be, and there's always trash that needs to be picked up. It's meditative and it gets me outside while I catch up on podcasts. Anyway, here's a poem about eating garbage.

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PyAutoGUI is a GUI automation Python package I created and maintain. It allows your Python scripts to control the mouse and keyboard on Windows, macOS, and Linux. PyAutoGUI is featured in my book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (available for free online) and gained a toehold of popularity. With the rise of RPA (robotic process automation, which has nothing to do with robots and as far as I can tell is just another term for scripts that control the mouse and keyboard) I've been meaning to bring PyAutoGUI up to mature standards of features and documentation. As a first step in that direction, I decided to take a look at academics use of PyAutoGUI according to Google Scholar search results and write up my findings in this blog post.

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Anki, Quizlet, Brainscape... I dislike all these overcomplicated flashcard apps. I just want the software equivalent of index cards, so I created TSOFA - The Simple, Offline, Flashcard App. It's exists entirely in a single HTML file you can view in the browser. You can edit the flashcards directly in the file, using just text or HTML tags. Check out this demo. It also supports a CSV string for the flashcard content so you can import flashcards from other apps. Otherwise, it's just a simple, free flashcard app: No server, no ads, no registration, no premium features to pay for, no dependencies, no build process, no cloud sync. There are more details on the TSOFA webpage. You can suggest improvements or report bugs on the GitHub repo.

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I created an online video course that follows the first edition of my book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. Here are all the ways to access the 50 videos of this course it for the lowest price possible:

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Computers can count. But ChatGPT 5, the latest and greatest model from OpenAI, one of the leading AI products available... doesn't count. I gave ChatGPT 5 several basic counting tasks and it failed nearly all of them: It can't generate an output of exactly 1,000 letter A's. It can't give me an accurate count when I give it 1,000 letter A's. It can't even get the same wrong count for letters other than A. AI companies have spent billions on AI that can't do something computers have been doing since the beginning of computing: Count.

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I needed a simple way to create desktop apps with Python that didn't involve installing large GUI toolkits like PyQT or PySide, so I've created ButtonPad, a simple, intentionally-limited Python GUI framework for creating a grid of buttons, labels, text boxes, and images. I modeled them after the design of programmable stream deck or drum machine hardware. The source is on GitHub. It's built on top of tkinter, so it is lightweight and doesn't need additional GUI packages. Widget layout is done with a single comma-separated multiline string. No widget subclassing, no designer files, no sprawling boilerplate; just a layout string and some basic options. Still, I've made a surprising variety of simple apps with it which can all be run from the launcher program: python -m buttonpad

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This is an opinionated tutorial for the Pelican static blog generator. Writing a tutorial forces me to fill in all the gaps of my knowledge. The main reason I'm writing this tutorial is because I want to get a solid understanding of Pelican for making my website.

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Sweigart's Law of PEP 8 Complaints is: "Any time someone complains about source code violating PEP 8, they are always complaining that the source code uses camelCase instead of snake_case. The complaint is never about any other part of PEP 8." What is the point of Python Enhancement Proposal document number 8, and how does it get used and misused? Why do we write code the way we do, and how meaningful are conversations about code style and readability anyway?

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Scroll art is moving ASCII art produced by stdout text printed from a loop, animated as the text scrolls up the terminal. It's especially useful as creating computing projects for beginner programmers. Because it only uses text, no environment setup or additional libraries are needed and scroll art can be made in every programming language. I've published examples of scroll art on https://scrollart.org, but now I've also included Python implementations in the scrollart package, which you can install by running pip install scrollart and view with python -m scrollart --help.

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As part of an AI-generated code experiment, I had ChatGPT 5 create a Rock Paper Scissors "arena simulator" where different emojis play a game of tag. Emoji converts the "prey" emoji that they catch. This idea follows the tradition of "spatial rock paper scissors" simulations, such as this Julia-language "agents" framework example. I did multiple attempts, but you can view one chat log here.. You can download the rpsarena package from PyPI and see the source code in its git repo. The rpsarena package uses tkinter and has no dependencies outside of the Python standard library. After installing, run python -m rpsarena --help to view instructions on how to set up a game.

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