In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart Busschots joins us to talk about weather apps. He's a serious weather nerd by necessity, living in Ireland and being an avid bike rider. As he walks through the apps he'll explain which ones fall down on privacy, which ones have good apps for everything from the watch to iOS to the Mac. He'll even go through how he uses different widgets to help him decide how much rain gear to wear.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_04_26

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In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart Busschots joins us to talk Dyson vacuums. I know that doesn't sound too technical but you'd be surprised how advanced the tech is in the new devices. I share a few of my Dyson stories too and we both talk about our love for everything Dyson. Hide your pocketbooks before listening because all Dyson products are super expensive!

In our previous episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots taught us how to create lookup tables with jq from JSON data using the `from_entries` command. Just when we have that conquered, this time he teaches us how to do the exact opposite – disassemble lookup tables. I think this was a really fun lesson because taking data apart, reassembling it the way you want and then putting it back together again is a great way to really understand what we're doing with jq. I got much more comfortable as I started to recognize the patterns in what Bart was doing. We also get to play with a new data set, the Have I Been Pwned data gathered by Troy Hunt.

If you're a data nerd, and really who amongst us isn't, you'll love this episode too.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots as usual works through his solution to the challenge from last time, and as usual I learn a lot more about how to use jq to solve problems. He takes a bit of a detour to explain a fun email we got from Jill of Kent in which she explained the vast number of headaches you'll run into when trying to alphabetize names no matter the language.

Then we buckle down and learn about how to make tradeoffs between speed and efficiency of resources, and how jq lookups can help us. Bart also helps us understand _when_ lookups can help us with querying JSON files.

This episode is more of a lecture, which is fine because he's introducing a new concept and explaining some philosophy. You won't hear me breaking into the conversation very much but it's only because I'm not confused! Don't worry, when we get into the final example you'll hear me get confused! Bart explains it about 3 or 4 times and when you hear why your co-host here was confused, it's kind of ironic.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Bart Busschots is back to teach us how to alter arrays and dictionaries in JSON files using jq. Bart went through his challenge solution on cleaning up the Nobel Prize database and I learned a lot from it. Maybe he'd already taught all of it to us before but I sure wouldn't have been able to put the pieces together.

For the new content, we learned how to alter arrays. We mastered sorting and reversing, how to add and remove elements, how to deduplicate the values within, and how to flatten even nested arrays. From there we learned how to manipulate dictionaries by adding and removing keys.

It's a very focused lesson that continues to show how powerful the jq language is. I think my favorite part though was when Bart made an existential philosophy observation when he said "Everything exists with the value of null."

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart continues to expand our knowledge on how to use jq to query and manipulate JSON files. We learn how to use mathematical operators on data in our JSON files along with fun functions like floor and absolute value. I even contributed some to the learning by showing examples of how `ceil` (for ceiling), `floor`, and `round` produce curiously different results when operating on negative decimal numbers.

We move onto learning about both plain assignment and update assignment. It seems like a small deal but the ability to set a parameter using the plain assignment `=` vs the ability to update a value using ` |=` is is actually huge and has lots of subtleties.

I think one of my favorite parts was when Bart took us back to our JavaScript lessons and reminded us of how weird it is on one concept but how jq is much more in line with modern programming languages. I felt like a seasoned programmer because I knew the history of what we'd learned. Finally we learned how you can actually divide strings. I know, weird, right? Ok, that's enough spoilers.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_17

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to use jq as a programming language. Before we get into the new stuff, Bart takes us through his solution to the challenge, and I have to say I was pretty chuffed when he said my solution to the extra credit portion was more elegant than his. To be fair, it took a buddy programming session with him for me to get the _first_ part of the challenge figured out.

When we got into the programming language part of the lesson, there were so many times that I said, "I needed this last week!" I think finding out these options are available after understanding the problems they solve was fantastic.

We learned how to run jq filters from files, which means no more looking at our filters all on one line - we can put line feeds and indents into our filters to make them more readable. We can even add comments. Bart tells us about a couple of handy plugins for VS Code to give us syntax highlighting which will be swell.

My favorite thing I learned was how to add debugging to our filters. This one is a life changer. We explore a few functions for exploring data filters that will make life easier. We wrap up with an introduction to jq variables, which the developers of jq really don't want you to use unless absolutely necessary.

This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite is a stretch to the word "Lite". I'd call it a crossover episode of Lite and Programming By Stealth. Helma van der Linden joins me to tell the story of how she has successfully started the new version of Bart's fabulous xkpasswd password generation service. xkpasswd.net was written in perl ages ago and depends on very old and outdated libraries. Bart spent many months teaching the Programming By Stealth students the tools we (and he) would need to port the code over to JavaScript. His plan all along was to have students help him make the new version of XKPASSWD a reality.

It turns out that Helma is an extraordinary student and has done most of the work to make it a minimal viable product, all without Bart's help. In this conversation, we'll talk about how she did this without getting _too_ nerdy. Some nerdy but not too nerdy.

If you'd like to give the very beta version of the new tool a try (without knowing any coding), check it out at bartificer.github.io/xkpasswd-js/. In a few days, Bart will have it up as the beta version of the _real_ xkpasswd at beta.xkpasswd.net. This beta version is not feature-complete, but it allows you to create 1-10 passwords that use the default preset from the original xkpasswd. You can't choose different presets, and you can't make customized passwords, but at least it does create long, strong, memorable, and typable passwords. And it's REALLY pretty!

We end with the call for others to come help work on the code. The GitHub repo is at github.com/bartificer/xkpasswd-js. If you have or create a GitHub account, you can contribute to the project. If you don't have programming skills but you have feature requests, it counts as contributing if you use the "issues" tab for the GitHub project to post your feature request.

Helma is great fun and we had a blast talking about what she's accomplished so I think you'll enjoy the conversation no matter how nerdy you might be.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_03

In this very meaty episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to build data structures using jq with JSON files. We're not just querying existing data, we're rebuilding the data the way we want to see it. We learn how to build strings with interpolation, which I find is a very odd word to describe the process. It's really like concatenation in Excel, but maybe that's just me.

We build arrays using jq, and even convert between strings and arrays with the `split` and `join` commands. We build dictionaries in a syntax that is simple and elegant. We also build dictionaries from strings using `capture` with Regular Expressions.

We learn not to do string formatting and escaping using `@` – for example `@csv` can automatically create comma-separated values data for us and @uri can escape characters for us in a URL we build using jq.

Like I said, it's a meaty episode but Bart and I both enjoyed the lesson quite a bit.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. And just in case I forgot to mention it earlier, remember that we now have transcripts with chapter breaks. This means you can jump pretty easily to a topic to reread exactly how Bart explained something. You even get a time stamp of when he talked on that subject, allowing you to easily skim to the portion of the audio you want to rehear for clarification. All thanks to the magic of Auphonic. Ok, it's not magic, but it _feels_ like magic!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2024_01_20

Two weeks ago, Bart Busschots and I recorded a Programming By Stealth episode covering more queries using the jq language on our JSON files. We spent so much time working through the challenges from the previous installment that we only made it halfway through his tutorial shownotes. So this week we're back with the second half of that episode, Programming By Stealth 158B.

Before we got started learning, I alerted the audience to a significant enhancement to the material we create for this show.

I use a service called Auphonic to do a lot of things with the audio file when we're done recording, including leveling the audio, adding metadata to it, converting it to an MP3, and FTPing it to the server for the listeners to download. Auphonic has recently added AI-generated transcripts which we've had for a while with Programming By Stealth.

The NosillaCast has chapter marks you can use to jump to content in the audio file, but Chit Chat Across the Pond has never had that. Auphonic now adds auto-generated chapters based on the content in the audio file. These chapter marks are in the transcript, which allows you to jump to the text of where we cover a specific topic.

Not only that, these auto-generated chapters are in the audio file so in your podcatcher you can now jump to different sections instead of having to scroll through to find something Bart explained.

The chapter marks are not perfect, and we have no intention of editing them, but it should give you an easier way to find what you want to re-listen to or re-read. While Bart has spectacular tutorial shownotes, the transcript gives you the full flavor of the conversation we have while Bart is teaching me.

Now back to this week's show! In this week's episode, Bart explains two powerful commands for searching JSON files with jq, the `contains` and `inside` functions. In this context, he goes through testing for containment with strings, arrays, dictionaries and he tells us about default containment. Then he explains how the `inside` function does essentially the opposite of testing for containment. Finally, he shows us how to use regular expressions with the `test` function to get as granular as we like with our jq filters.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_30

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart Busschots and I start off by going through the challenges from our previous installment. Remember how I said I was really digging jq and querying JSON files because at heart I'm a data nerd? Well, I failed completely at accomplishing the homework. It was not for lack of trying though - I worked about 4 hours on just the first challenge. Because of a fundamental building block that wasn't properly in place in my brain, I was never going to succeed.

That means that this episode is almost half about the challenges and Bart carefully re-explaining the pieces he'd taught us in the previous installment. We both agree that it's good work because if I was lost, there's a reasonable chance that one other student was as well.

Because of my questions, we cut the episode in half, so the shownotes are complete but the second half will be explained in PBS 158B which we'll record in a couple of weeks.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_20

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Join the Conversation:

• [email protected]
• podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show:

• Patreon Donation
• PayPal one-time donation
• Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle
• Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

Referral Links:

• Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me
• Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me
• Backblaze - One free month for me and you
• Setapp - One free month for me and you
• Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you.
• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude