Code Smart Timer and Ultimate Calculator with Qt

This time, I’ll show you a few projects I did last June. First, smart timer. Back then I wanted to learn some basics about GUI design, so I looked into PyQt. After doing some digging in the documents, I decided to do something for real. I really liked the simple design of Chris Dziemborowicz’s Hourglass, so I tried to imitate it to practice. I ended up with a timer which had more or less all the primary functions Hourglass had, and looked fairly similar. It could parse simple natural language inputs like “3 hours 5 minutes” or “5m 30s”, but once I press the “start” button, time would turn into […]

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Make Google Dictionary Extension better with AutoHotkey

The other day I was doing assigned reading for my General Education Seminar. As a non-native English speaker, my vocabulary is not something that I’m proud of, and some big words in the reading started to slow me down. I turned to Google Dictionary for help, but the article was unfortunately in PDF format. I could not simply select the word and click the dictionary extension button. It just does not work with PDF file. I had to copy the word, hit the button, paste the word and then hit enter. Apparently, that was too much of a hassle for a lazy person like me, so I decided to write […]

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Scraping Course Schedule with Beautifulsoup

Class registration is no easy task. Getting all the courses one likes often takes a lot of researching and planning. To complicate the matter, some of the sections do not have instructor listed. Today (well, actually a month ago) I am going to deal with this problem.

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Summer Days – A Roll of Expired Fuji Superia 200

Earlier this year, my parents found out a crappy Huqiu SLR, together with it a roll of Fuji Superia 200. As shown on the box, it has been expired for more than a decade. I have wanted to try this roll of film since I got it, for I have never tried expired film before. Recently, I finally got the chance. To be honest, I was quite surprised when I received scans from the lab, for it well exceeded my expectations. As far as I know, it has been sitting in our attic for years, and has been baked on many summers days. Temperatures here can reach 40 degrees in the […]

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