Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Time to celebrate! I published my first Python package to PyPI, Suite8080 . It’s a suite of Intel 8080 Assembly cross-development tools. It’s in early development, misses some tools, and is rough around the edges. But it works, does something useful (if you’re into retrocomputing), and I’m having ridiculous amounts of fun with this hobby project. The Python Package Index (PyPI) website. The celebration is wearing out and I’m about to resume the work to complete and improve Suite8080, yet something still bugs me. Although it’s well known PyPI is unforgiving for good reasons, the package publishing process is not as straightforward as the tutorials make it seem . I run into a few unexpected minor bumps none of the guides mention. It’s not that the tutorials aren’t good, they are. I recommend the Real Python article on publishing a package to PyPI . But the authors of these guides are so experienced, and probably so detached from the challenges beginners face, they may not be aware some i...

 What's the first thing to do after installing an astronomy or space app on Android? Turn off any alarms and notifications in the app's settings. Although these apps try to be helpful, they are noisy and alert you of interesting celestial phenomena or space events, such as the phases of the Moon, planetary conjunctions, satellite passes, and rocket launches. The option to turn off alarms in the ISS passes screen of the ISS onLive Android app. I learnt it the hard way when alarms in the wee hours of the night showed up on my Pixel 4 XL phone. It turned out an update of the ISS onLive app had set up alarms for International Space Station passes.

Although the Nimbus Chrome extension is my primary screenshot and screencasting tool, I’m re-discovering the native Chrome OS screen capture functionality . Two features of the latter improve my workflow, the ability to precisely frame the capture area and to save screen recordings in the WebM video format. The Crostini Linux Terminal on my ASUS Chromebox 3. I took this screenshot with the area framing controls of the Chrome OS screen capture tool. When I activate the tool by pressing Shift+Ctrl+ShowWindows and draw the selection rectangle to delimit an area of the screen, clicking and dragging a corner brings up a magnified inset of the area around the mouse pointer that allows the precise adjustment of the selection rectangle . To make the inset show up, I have to release the mouse button after drawing the rectangle, then click a corner. My ASUS Chromebox 3 has a mouse, which allows for fine tuning the rectangle’s size and position. The trackpad or touch screen of my Chromebook req...