Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Nathan Zilora interviewed me for Repl Talk and Repl.it Weekly, the Repl.it community forum. After a brief introduction I talked about how I started using Repl.it, how I plan to combine astronomy and programming in my activities, the Astropy astronomy Python library and how programmers can learn to use it, the space podcast I co-host, and the Google Product Experts Program I'm a member of. My interview on Repl.it's community forum Repl Talk. Thanks to Nathan and Repl.it for the opportunity of sharing my experiences and thoughts! Repl.it is a multi-language cloud IDE. It supports dozens of programming languages and frameworks. It’s my favorite IDE because it works fully in the cloud, a killer feature for a Chrome OS enthusiast like me. Repl.it pushes the limits of what development tools can do in the cloud. It’s constantly improving and provides some advanced features, such as Multiplayer Mode for collaborative development and Git/GitHub support . Another neat fea...

One of the books I read on Kivy , a Python cross-platform GUI framework, is Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio: With Pyjnius, Plyer, and Buildozer by Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad (Apress, 2019). My comments on the book , which focused on it not being a good match for my learning needs, sounded negative. Perhaps unnecessarily so. The cover of Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio in Google Play Books on my Pixel 2 XL. The author, Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad , emailed me concerning my feedback. He provided more context on how he researched the market to position the book, planned the content, and selected the topics to cover. This is valuable information, so I’m publishing it here with his permission. Here’s what Ahmed wrote: At first, thanks for the feedback you posted considering my book titled "Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio". I read your feedback carefully and managed to send this e-mail ...

Mars Sky is an Android app for viewing at a glance the major planetary objects in the sky of Mars at a given location. The main screen of the Mars Sky app on my Pixel 2 XL phone. This unusual app doesn’t show an accurate representation of the sky but a simplified view of the celestial sphere with the major Solar System objects . The view places the planetary bodies at their approximate positions in the sky. The celestial objects Mars Sky features are the Sun, the planets (including the Earth and our Moon), and the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. You can get position and visibility data of each body such as the coordinates, the angular size, the brightness, and more. A list of major events like the rising and setting times of the objects is also available. There are some preset observing locations to choose from, such as the landing sites of spacecrafts , but you can add more. Mars Sky displays dates and times using a martian calendar you may not be familiar with. So be ...

I’ve always heard about the bloatware vendors preinstall to their Android devices but never experienced it. Until now. A few days ago I turned on my Lenovo Tab E7 tablet and an unknown icon showed up at the left edge of the home screen. You can see the icon in this screenshot. The unknown icon that showed up at the left side of the home screen of my Lenovo Tab E7 tablet. Dragging the unknown icon to the right brought up a screen that resembles the home page of YouTube as shown here. Dragging the unknown icon to the right brought up the screen of the Lenovo Entertainment bloatware. Tapping the icon featuring a head wearing headphones, at the top right of the YouTube screen, opened a Lenovo account sign in and sign up dialog. The YouTube screen slid onto the main home screen from the virtual screen immediately to the left of the main home screen. This spot, where Pixel devices have the Google Discover feed, is not usually accessible on my Lenovo Tab E7. Along with the ...

The Kivy Python GUI framework is intriguing. Not only it’s cross-platform but also supports Android. Java is too verbose and low level for me and Kivy is an opportunity for developing native Android apps without leaving Python. Outside of the Kivy project documentation, there are few third-party advanced tutorials that go in more depth than the official tutorials. So, before diving into the code of the Kivy demos, I wanted some books to explore more features and get a broader picture of the framework and what it can do. I found two potentially interesting books: Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio: With Pyjnius, Plyer, and Buildozer by Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad (Apress, 2019), and Kivy - Interactive Applications and Games in Python - Second Edition by Roberto Ulloa (Packt, 2015). I read both and here are my impressions. Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio I had much hope for Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy wi...

Self-published book authors are supposed to have many skills. These skills draw on a diverse variety of fields such as marketing, book formatting and typesetting, business, audio and video production, social media management, intellectual property, software, and web design. All this on top of mastering writing and the domains the authors cover. Along with the books, these skills lead authors to produce additional content and artifacts like websites, email newsletters, ebooks files, podcasts, videos, and many more. But authors are strongly, very strongly discouraged from making their own book covers. To the point it’s a taboo. The recommended way is to hire a professional artist or cover designer. It’s sound advice as a bad cover can significantly reduce sales. But I don’t see why authors can’t learn to design covers the same way they can, and have to, learn to create the other content and artifacts. And, for some genres like non-fiction and technical works, a perfect cover ma...

I bought a Lenovo Tab E7 Android tablet. It was sort of an impulse buy after seeing the device on display at a consumer electronics store and realizing how cheap it is. A buying decision made easier by some Amazon credit I had around. I got the 16 GB version for €74.99 at Amazon. But there are other reasons I wanted a tablet. The home screen of my Lenovo Tab E7 tablet. Why I got a tablet I owned and loved the Nexus 7 tablets, both the original 2012 and the 2013 version. When later getting the massive Nexus 6 phablet with its beautiful large screen, I began using the Nexus 7 less and less. When Google stopped providing system updates, I sold the remaining unit I still had. Since then tablets have apparently gone out of favor with Android users. And manufacturers significantly cut down on the development and production of new models. But I have always loved the slate form factor, particularly 7” tablets . These tablets are small enough to be compact, but with a larg...