It’s a minor annoyance that comes up often in GitHub comments: syntax highlighting for Python console sessions. You want the input code (after the prompt) to be highlighted, but the output (which is generally just text or logs) to remain neutral. Turns out there’s a syntax highlighter that does just that.

Over the past few years I’ve increasingly tried to make small contributions to open source projects that I use. I’m not on the core team of any one project, so usually my contributions are very small. That’s why I was very surprised when I got an email from Google’s Open Source Peer Bonus program, letting me know that I had been nominated!

The European Environment Agency (EEA) provides a selection of datasets about air quality in Europe. The data is available for download at the portal, but the interface makes it a bit time consuming to do bulk downloads. Hence, an easy Python-based interface.

Quite a while ago I saw a short film called Skwerl, meant to demonstrate “how English sounds to non-English speakers”. As a native English speaker, watching it is quite surreal. The sounds and accents are totally familiar, and there are definitely words in there that you recognize, but there is no discernible overall meaning whatsoever. It’s actually kind of hard to listen to. All you’ve got to hang onto is that what you’re hearing somehow feels like English. And that’s the point. Skwerl gave me the idea to attempt to create a similar effect, but with reading instead of listening. I wanted to see how English looks to non-English readers. And so I created engl_ish.