Alex A talked about the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” – he has liked having this as his desktop background. But getting hold of all the images is hard – there’s an torrent but that’s very old, you can download the site via wget but that leads to duplication and an odd file structure. They do have an API via https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod (and there are a lot of other NASA APIs) – but the parameters that the API describes don’t actually work! You can retrieve a chunk of JSON for an individual picture at a time – but if you repeatedly call it, then you get banned for too many accesses. It turns out that you can pass in a start_date and an end_date, and get a big chunk of JSON back from it, which resolves the “too many accesses” problem. He parsed this with the Newtonsoft JSON library (very useful for .NET JSON parsing), dealing with a few dirty data issues. One of the problems is that there are some specific dates that don’t work – and if they’re inside your date range, then the whole date range fails! So, Alex wrote code to bisect the date range repeatedly to find what the problematic date was so it could be excluded from the range. There were also some broken images in the data. Alex has now downloaded all of these files, organized them by size, and put them in a torrent, so they are now freely available.
Alex G talked about Powershell, and how he uses it. It uses an object-oriented scripting language, based on .NET (or .NET core for Powershell Core), and also has ksh-style syntax. It supports basic calculation on the command-line like addition and multiplication – and can do more complex maths with e.g. [Math]::Exp(2) – and it will autocomplete from within .NET packages too. It supports setting up aliases. “ogv” (Out-GridView) is a useful graphical tool for filtering text… but it only works on Windows. Because it’s acting on objects and passing objects between components, you can act on them as objects – e.g. “ls | select -Property length” will select the “length” property of each filename. “ls | convertto-json” will create a JSON format of the input, and convertfrom-json will conver it back again into a JSON object that can be traversed via JSON dot notation. Powershell Core is available on OS X and on Windows – and if you’re working on a mix of Windows and Unix environments, then it can be useful to use Powershell across each environment.
Inigo talked about Amazon Polly, a speech synthesis tool that we’ve been using for a client. The impressive thing about it is how well it reads out scientific text – while we’ve looked at speech synthesis before, it’s always been good at doing common words but has fallen over with technical text. Polly copes very well.