Articles in the Software category

Most viewed people articles on Wikipedia by year of death

For fun, and to practice my rusty Pandas skills, I calculated and plotted the most viewed people articles on Wikipedia by year of death. In other words, the most "popular" death in each of the past 122 years. The "most viewed" part is the number of views each page received …

(Flawed) Iterative heap sort for files

I've recently been working on a tiny self-contained Python time-series database library for a side project. It stores its data in human-readable text files, one per "table" per day. For speed reasons, there are no checks to make sure appended data is in the correct order, i.e. that newly …

Creating an op-amp 1/f noise spectra in code

So-called 1 ⁄ f or "pink" noise is noise with a power spectral density that is inversely proportional to frequency. It manifests itself in op-amps as both an input voltage and input current noise, where it is commonly called flicker noise. It is typically characterised on op-amp datasheets in terms of …

Bypass cookie permission dialogs on websites in Firefox

Since GDPR was introduced in the EU, users in Europe have been bombarded with requests to give permission to websites to store cookies to track your movement around their sites and networks. Usually, the form this permission request takes is a dialog that immediately pops up when you load the …

Start Firefox with a temporary, throwaway session, with no add-ons

This is a handy trick for starting a new, temporary profile on Firefox on Linux to use websites that break when you block their privacy invasion.

I heavily lock down my Firefox settings to block trackers, isolate websites from loading third-party content and setting cookies, blocking supercookie techniques such as …