Graphing the commute time to Uni from different possible wellington flats

2018-03-23 | Python , Html , Web ,

Why?

Basically, during my flat hunt one of the most important criteria for choosing a place was the distance and commute time to uni. Ideally somewhere close enough that I could walk to uni is the best option, but I dont mind taking a bus. Living at home, my commute was a 45 minute train ride plus a 15 minute drive to the train station, and a 20 minute walk from the station.

How?

How do I get a list of addresses for flats that were on the market? Trademe! Trademe offer an API to do this very easily, but from my understanding you need to apply for a license to be able to use the api on the main website. Now, I didn't want to do that just to run a one-time script so I did the next best thing: web scraping. Using Beautiful soup I was able to pull the street address off of each listing on a filtered trademe search.

Next, I had to use the google maps api to give me the travel time to the uni from each flat. Because google maps can only take so many queries at once I had to split each call up into chunks of 5 or 10 addresses. I did this for both transit(Bus/Cablecar/Train) and walking. For us, the most relevant chart was walking as we really want a place that is within walking distance.

Then, using that, I graphed the results with Matplotlib:

The graphs

Weirdly, the first graph seems to show a big chunk being under 25 minutes and then a big chunk after that. I theorise that this could be because of the line between 'inner city' flats and 'outer city flats' - ie outside the CBD area. Alot of student accommodation in Karori is over 25 minutes away - I imagine this is likely due to all the flats that are 25 minutes away are all rented already and people like the location.

update 15th July - Well, alot of the bus routes have changed as of today, but I theorise the results are still mostly relevant.

Where to go from here?

I could try making a graph of price versus travel time and try look for correlations. Also, I could take different readings throughout the year and try see if the available flats get further away as time goes on and students move into the close ones.

Wheres the source code?

When I was installing linux on my surface tab apparently bitlocker was enabled (???) and triggered after I changed the partition size of windows causing the tablet to lock down completely. After multiple calls with microsoft support it turns out they dont store the keys anywhere to get my computer unlocked. In all my infinite wisdom I forgot to check the source code into source control so now ive lost it... hopefully theres a backup somewhere on my network.

My smart home, more server stuff, and plans for IoT

2018-02-20 | IoT , Python , Arduino , Html , Web ,

This post is a work in progress.

What I have now

I have a bunch of random stuff around that I plan on connecting together in a DIY IoT-thingy. While I am still looking for a flat this project is pretty much on hold for installing permanent fixtures but I can still experiment in my test environment and get a basic setup going.

Currently the components I have are:

• 3 raspberry pi's
• millions of ESP8266 Nodemcu kits (these things are awesome)
• two old security cameras
• an Amazon Echo Dot
• a few temperature sensors
• motion sensors
• a bluetooth speaker
• 5 metres of RGB LED striplights
• arduino's everywhere
• 433mhz power outlets!

What am I going to do with all of this, I hear you ask?

Here is a list of all the things that I plan on doing right away:

All of the sensors feed into a central hub that controls everything. This is Home Assistant and its freaking awesome. Its open source and made in python so is easy to configure and extend. My current home page looks like this (it's a bit basic of course):

todo put a photo here 6/3/18

I recently got an amazon echo from Kordia as a leaving gift. I plan on using it to add voice automation to home assistant - everything that can be controlled through the web interface should be voice controlled too. Alexa - the echo's voice - can be extended through the use of skills, which can be developed for free. There are already a bunch on the amazon store.

The Server

I recently got myself a new rackmount server - a Dell R170 poweredge. It has 64 gigs of ram, 16 cores, 5 odd hard drives and all the other redundant power supply goodness. Hopefully I should be getting a new managed switch as well to handle most of the networking in the flat. The server is running proxmox but i'm thinking about switching to VMware to be more like the industry standard.

Some of the things the server does currently and will do in the future:

• Plex - video streaming to every computer in the house (I have about 2tb of movies and TV shows currently)
• Pihole - network wide ad blocking (even on phones)
• Couchpotato & Sonarr - automatic downloading of TV and movies
• Deluge - manual centralised downloads
• Wiki (confluence) - centralised wiki notes for uni, the flat, homelab documentation
• Nextcloud - self-hosted fileserver like dropbox
• VPN - access any of our computers at home from anywhere in the world
• Jenkins - CI build server
• Web server - hosting my website and anyone elses
• Game servers - arma, tf2, etc etc
• Calibre - self hosted ebook server
• Gitlab - git repository (like github).
• Pfsense - router
• Home Assistant - IoT home automation hub

Here's what the flat lab will look like:

Dino - An 8-bit, gun-wielding dinosaur game!

2017-10-30 | Processing , Games ,

Completely ripping off the sprites from the google chrome offline page, save princess diana-saur from the angry pterodactyls in this hectic little game! Made with processing for my computer graphics course, I intend on adding some more features and making it into a full game.

My focus was more on the programming side of it, which is the reason the sprites were unashamedly ripped from the internet. Doing this allowed me to spend more time on developing a good engine with particle systems and game mechanics which I feel is more important, especially for learning.

You can view the source code and download here.

What this website is

2017-07-06 | Html , Python , Web ,

I’m writing this 6 months after I finished the website so you’ll have to bear with me. Somehow i’ve survived first trimester at Uni. It’s been a stressful change to my life, to say the least! I’m happy that I have a few weeks off between trimesters to get back to some of my projects.

Anywho, if you’ve seen the sidebar on the main page you will know that this website is my ‘creative outlet’. I started around Christmas 2016 and worked on it after work during the summer holidays. The idea came up when I realised that I wanted my own space to spout random ideas, thoughts and ramblings to the world. Social media almost felt too restricting. With my own website, I could make it my own little world - a place I can modify and personalise to my heart’s content. When I found the student developer pack on github I found that I could effectively keep a webserver going for free for about a year until the free credit ran out.

First Revision, modifying one of the bootstrap base templates:

I have always liked google’s Material Design language and I wanted to mimic it in the design of the website. I went ahead and completely redid the site, and found a nice colour scheme using a palette generator. I ended up with this:

Edit: I just realised the text on the second image. Haha, woops.

After this point I kept the design and added all the other pages. In its current form, this is what the website looks like!

This new site has a bit of javascript to keep things interesting, and css link effects stolen from Codrops. I added bits and pieces here and there to the design and also have added a ‘favourite projects’ box right on the front page.

The front-end is cool and all, but the backend is the favourite part of this website. Using sqlite3 I designed a database to store all the posts and even made a dashboard that only I can access to edit and add new posts.

This is all done with flask. The hardest part of this website was probably designing the blog - it sorts the posts by post date and has pages to show 5 posts at a time. I also included a tag filter to reduce the posts down. I could probably open source the page but I don’t want to open myself up to any security holes. Overall i’m happy with how the website turned out and i’m excited to have a place to show off my projects.

I made a prototype job-searching website for teens

2016-02-16 | Web , Html ,

Rentakid started as one of my first proper web design projects over two years ago. Inspired by Trademe and Student Job Search, Rentakid's idea is simple: you put an ad on the website for a small chore that needs doing (such as mowing the laws, feeding the cats or helping with some manual labour) and a old child/teenager can search through local listings, choose a job they can do, and the website helps the employer set up times, payment and communication with the employee.

Because I didn't know any database stuff back then, the website is just a simple bunch of html pages. I may in the future decide to pick up where I left off and turn it into a full website.