voidynullness

ADSL dropouts and overcharging: The confidence trickery of broadband in Australia.

It got to the point I just had no choice. Had to do it. I’d had enough.

I’d had enough of the increasingly frequent ADSL dropouts on my increasingly less reliable TPG broadband service.

I’d had enough of a Telstra phone line with so much noise, static and crackling sounds that it was almost impossible to hear the person on the other end.

I’d had enough of both my phone and internet going to hell every …

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Using Python to get email from a Gmail account via IMAP: The Least You Need To Know.

I have a filter setup in a Gmail account to automatically collect what are essentially automatically generated emails from a particular source, and file them neatly away into a label, leaving the inbox relatively uncluttered with their consistently formatted regularness. Thing is, those particular emails are not achieving their potential for maximum usefulness to me by just sitting there in my Gmail account. And with their predictable content, they are ripe candidates for parsing and extracting the useful data, and …

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Python example of subclassing a Qt QTableWidget control and overriding copy behavior so that the entire selected row is copied to the clipboard, and stored in a Excel-friendly format for proper pasting.

Hello there QTableWidget, you look like just the sort of Qt control I’m looking for. I want to stick some data into you. But once the data is inside you, I might want to do other things. Like perhaps copy and paste rows of data into Excel …

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Possible uses for arbitrary content metadata in Pelican blog themes.

How to add support for HTML meta description tags to a Pelican theme by taking advantage of the ability to add arbitrary metadata to article and page content.

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A Python script to convert date fields in a CSV file from MM/DD/YYYY to DD/MM/YYYY format — because Excel wouldn’t do it properly!

I imagine there must be many jobs, especially in and around the finance industry, where using Excel is part of daily life. I feel sorry for those people.

I find myself using spreadsheets quite a bit lately, and it’s often a frustrating experience. There’s a lot of annoyingly repetitive pointing and …

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Python example of using QSqlTableModel to link a database table to a QComboBox control.

Qt provides some useful mappers for easily linking relational database tables with table/grid widgets. This works well for quickly producing simple CRUD applications. But sometimes we might want to escape the limitations of table and grid controls, and do something fancier — something to provide users with a more customised, fine-grained interface, which usually ends up being something based on forms/dialogs. So we design a form, populate it with controls, and we are then faced with having to populate …

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