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11.02.2026 20:06
centricular (@centricular@floss.social)

New Centricular Devlog post by Nirbheek Chauhan:

https://centricular.com/devlog/2026-02/Windows-ARM64/

#gstreamer #python #windows #arm64 #multimedia

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11.02.2026 20:05
Reuven (@Reuven@fosstodon.org)

Woo hoo! 🎉

My book, #Python Workout (2nd edition), is now the #20 best-selling book in programming languages at Amazon.

Thanks so much to everyone who has bought it, and also to everyone leaving such kind reviews.

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11.02.2026 20:04
reb (@reb@retro.social)

Content warning:Project Writeup, long

I have been using computers for a very long time, since before I was aware of being alive in fact! They somehow seem very Ordinary while remaining Magic. Long ago I wanted to be a software developer, but Life didn’t go that way for various reasons. I have dabbled with writing software now and then, but usually find it difficult to stick with projects to completion, probably because I choose things that are entirely too big in scope for my level of experience; I could absolutely make every required component, but managing myself in order to do *all* of them is a big ask.

I’m struggling my way through the tail end of seasonal depression, along with the added burden of a recent bereavement, I’ve been very unproductive in a huge way. I’m incredibly lucky that my boss is very understanding, shoutout to Andrew! Of course, I need to get back to being useful soon, for his sake and mine. Usually how I do this at this time of year is to find a nice little project that I can get my teeth into, and achieve minimum viable product as quickly as possible. I’ve had a few things on my mind, but nothing that really caught my imagination. A few days ago I was zoning out watching YouTube videos, mostly ones I had seen before. One which I watched was Tom Scott and Matt Grey talking about how and why they made a livestream of live chat being printed on a dot matrix printer, and immediately being fed into an industrial shredder. This sparked something in me, I’ve always found piercing the boundary between the digital and the physical fascinating, and oldschool line printers are very much that.

I looked on everyone’s favourite* online retailer for dot matrix printers, but since Matt and Tom bought theirs it seems that the supply of brand new units has dried up somewhat. What I did find though was thermal receipt printers! There are, of course, a good number of what are effectively toy printers, but they didn’t seem like they’d be hackable in the way that I’d enjoy. Luckily for me though, there are still standard printers designed for POS systems, featuring USB and not much else. The particular model I purchased was a new open box Xprinter POS 80.

As a linux user I am often wary of buying new peripherals, because the driver situation is Not Great even in 2026. However, receipt printers mostly use a standard called ESC/POS which was developed by Epson. Some light research revealed that this is a very simple standard to implement, particularly in the Everything Is A File ecosystem of *nix. Not that I’d have to implement it, as there is of course a fairly mature Python library which does just that.

Now, at the point I ordered the printer I wasn’t quite settled on what I’d like to do with it. I have some ideas for a task management system that automatically generates and prints daily/weekly/hourly todo lists for me, but that falls into that scope trap, doesn’t it?

Before the printer arrived I was idly daydreaming, and inspired by the fedi trend of having a message box on one’s personal website that sends you a notification when friends and strangers alike fill it in, I decided to build a means of my friends sending messages to the printer. I don’t particularly feel like having it open to the internet at large, I’m not a good enough developer to prevent it from being abused, and I got terribly tangled up trying to figure out how to do authentication and whatnot, not to mention how to punch a hole in my network so the internet can get at the printer. Maybe this would be a bigger project than I anticipated!

Then it hit me! Where are all of my friends? Discord! (I am not interested in discussion about Discord as a platform or a company or any of their recent decisions, thank you)
I looked into what is involved in writing a discord bot, and it turns out there’s a very well documented Python library for the Discord API! Obviously all I need to do is glue that together with the ESC/POS library and I’ll be winning!

The printer arrived and I… procrastinated. Then I read the documentation (which is a form of procrastination, of course). Once I had a picture of how the setup would need to work, I got to work. I had a dig in my pile of ewaste and found an Intel Mac Mini that had previously been used as my BSD based writing workstation, this would be perfect, particularly since it is powerful enough to run more of my silly software projects in future. I got that set up with Debian and plonked it in the corner of my living room with just the printer and a network cable plugged into it.

I don’t know why my preference for things like this is to put the hardware in place then SSH in to do all of the coding, but it is.

I wrangled a venv and used pip to install the two required libraries. As for my code? I don’t have much to say about it really, it is in reality just very basic glue code. Other than some initialisation code for discord and esc/pos, it is really just a single event that listens for new messages in a specific channel of the Discord server I admin for my small friend group. It takes the posters username, and the contents of the message, and dumps it straight into the text printing function of the printer, then advances the paper by a few lines and issues a cut command.

The technical detail of the project is almost entirely irrelevant, what I really want to convey with this post is that making things is fun, even if they’re silly. Especially if they are silly. I honestly think that if you are lost for how to make the world a better place, how to make yourself Feel Something, there are worse places to start than building a silly little project that makes you and a few of your friends smile. That’s how we build a better world. One smile at a time.

Thank you for listening to me ramble for entirely too long.

#linux #programming #python #hacking

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11.02.2026 20:04
r (@r@fed.brid.gy)

📢 Just about half an hour ago @sirosen.net@bsky.brid.gy cut a new release of #pip-tools — v7.5.3! $ python3.14 -Im pip install --upgrade pip-tools 📝 pip-tools.rtfd.io/en/stable/ch... 🔏 pypi.org/project/pip-... 🐍 #Python 📦 #packaging 👥 github.com/sponsors/sir... / github.com/sponsors/web... 💰

Changelog - pip-tools document...

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11.02.2026 20:04
r (@r@bsky.brid.gy)

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11.02.2026 20:04
webknjaz (@webknjaz@mastodon.social)

📢 Just about half an hour ago @sirosen cut a new release of #pip-tools — v7.5.3!

$ python3.14 -Im pip install --upgrade pip-tools

📝 https://pip-tools.rtfd.io/en/stable/changelog/#v7-5-3

🔏 https://pypi.org/project/pip-tools/7.5.3/#pip_tools-7.5.3-py3-none-any.whl

🐍 #Python 📦 #packaging

👥 https://github.com/sponsors/sirosen / https://github.com/sponsors/webknjaz 💰

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11.02.2026 19:48
slott56 (@slott56@fosstodon.org)

#TTRPG #DSL #Python

Progress. All the spells I extracted from OpenD6 rules now work with the DSL and actually produce approximately the expected difficulties. Discrepancies are mostly rounding. A few look like errors in the published rules.

Time to pull together a deeper blog post to show what the DSL looks like.

And. Move on to magical items. I think items will be a tidy subclass of spells.

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11.02.2026 19:20
zital (@zital@mastodon.eus)

"I Wrote a Python Script to Do Dark Souls 1 Runbacks for Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiqiFbVAEI0

#python #darksouls #gamedev

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11.02.2026 19:08
StatisticsGlobe (@StatisticsGlobe@mastodon.social)

My new ongoing learning program, the Statistics Globe Hub, is starting soon, and registration opens tomorrow with an Early Bird offer: https://statisticsglobe.com/hub

#statistics #datascience #ai #rstats #python