Today I learned about Marion Stokes' TV archive

Today I learned about Marion Stokes, a woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012. At her death, she had grown a collection of about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes. Her archivist and compulsive hoarding tendency also resulted in a collection of 30,000 to 40,000 books.

In 2019, a documentary film was made about her, and her archives named Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.

Her collection was archived by the Internet Archive which is available here.

Chandrayaan-3 landed on the moon

Today, August 23, 2023, ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 lunar exploration mission successfully landed on the moon at 6:04 PM IST (5:34 AM PT). The mission was launched on a Bahubali LVM3-M4 rocket carrying a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan on July 14 this year which I had logged here.

With this landing, India has become the fourth nation to make a soft landing on the moon, after the former Soviet Union, the U.S. and China. It has also become the first country to land on the lunar south pole, which is still an unexplored area.

ISRO's Tweet on the successful landing:

Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
'India,
I reached my destination
and you too!'
: Chandrayaan-3

Chandrayaan-3 has successfully
soft-landed on the moon 🌖!.

Congratulations, India!#Chandrayaan_3#Ch3

— ISRO (@isro) August 23, 2023

Below is the saved live stream of the landing on YouTube. The final phase of the descent starts at 35:13.

ISRO tweeted the first images received from the lander:

Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
Updates:

The communication link is established between the Ch-3 Lander and MOX-ISTRAC, Bengaluru.

Here are the images from the Lander Horizontal Velocity Camera taken during the descent. #Chandrayaan_3#Ch3 pic.twitter.com/ctjpxZmbom

— ISRO (@isro) August 23, 2023

Earlier on November 10, 2009, with the Chandrayaan-1 mission, ISRO made a deliberate crash landing of its Moon Impact Probe (MIP) which helped discover water molecules on the moon.

Today I Learned: All coal was created around the same time

There is an ongoing debate on whether almost all coal was made around the same time, during a brief period 360 to 300 million years ago.

Photo by Nikolay Kovalenko on Unsplash

We are using the coal that was created during this period and almost no new coal has formed since then.

Steve Mould provides an easy-to-understand explanation in this video on YouTube.

The Elk Valley Coal News has a detailed article on this here.

ChatGPT Prompts: A barebones list

With new advances in artificial intelligence and its subsets machine learning and deep learning, there are many applications based on large language models that generates human-like text. The common thing in all these applications is the need of prompts so they can come up with appropriate responses. This post contains a barebones list of prompts for ChatGPT that can be used to boost productivity.

Counter reply: Write a witty counter reply to the following statement: [insert statement here]

Meeting agenda: Draft an effective meeting agenda given [insert your points here].

Email communication: Draft a polite yet effective email response for [insert your situation].

Elevator pitch: Create an elevator pitch for [insert product or idea].

Social media captions: Create an engaging caption for this: [describe social media content].

Simplify explanations: Explain the following in simple terms: [insert text here].

Really simple explanations: ELI5: [insert text here].

Project timelines: Based on the following milestones, create a project timeline: [insert milestones].

Marketing slogans: Create a catchy marketing slogan for [insert product description].

Professional online summary: Write a professional summary for my LinkedIn profile, given these skills and experiences [insert information].

Business language: Translate this text into professional business language: [insert text]

Business strategy: Generate a business strategy for a startup in the [insert industry] sector.

Product description: Write a compelling product description for [insert product].

Efficient to-do lists: Prioritize and organize these tasks into a to-do list [insert tasks].

Optimize content for SEO: Improve the SEO of this blog post: [insert blog post].

Creative advertisements. Generate a creative advertisement concept for promoting [insert product description].

Persuasive sales copy: Generate a persuasive sales copy for [insert product description].

Optimized workflow: Create an optimized workflow based on these tasks [insert tasks].

Innovation strategies: Suggest strategies for driving innovation in the [insert industry] sector.

Team motivation: Draft a motivational message to my team about [insert topic].

Team building activities: Suggest some creative team building activities for a remote team.

Impactful presentations: Design a powerful slide deck for a presentation on [insert topic].

Fundraising proposals: Create a compelling fundraising proposal for [insert cause].

Project proposals: Draft a comprehensive project proposal for [insert project description].

Recruitment ads: Compose a job ad for the position of [insert job title].

General interview questions: Provide a professional and thoughtful response to this interview question: [insert question].

Crisis management plans. Create a crisis management plan for [insert crisis].

Miscellaneous ChatGPT Prompts

What are 5 creative things I could do with my kids' art? I don't want to throw them away, but it's also so much clutter.

Using Python and BeautifulSoup to web scrape Times of India news headlines

According to Wikipedia, "web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites." In this post, we will create a small program in Python to scrape top headlines from Times of India's news headlines page using the BeautifulSoup library.

Top news headlines

Particularly, our program will fetch the Times of India Headlines page and extract the prime news headlines on the top of the page. As of this writing, the page displays 6 headlines in that section which we want to scrape. In this screenshot of the webpage, our point of interest is the highlighted section which contains the top 6 headlines.

The programming language we will use is Python 3. Along with that, we will also use the BeautifulSoup 4 package for parsing the HTML. I will assume that you already have a system on which these prerequisites are installed and ready to run. I will also assume that you have a Python editor and compiler to compile and run the program. For the purpose of this illustration, I will use Google Colab to write and execute the python code.

Part 1: Scrape the website

To start with, we will write a simple code that fetches the data and outputs the scraped text in the editors output window. Type the following code in your Python editor. I will explain the code later in this post. A copy of this code is available at my TOITopHeadlines v1.0 repository on Github.

# This program scrapes a web page from Times of India to extract

# top headlines and prints it in the output window.

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def toi_topheadlines():

  url = "https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/headlines"

  page_request = requests.get(url)

  page_content = page_request.content

  soup = BeautifulSoup(page_content,"html.parser")

  count = 1

  for divtag_c02 in soup.find_all('div', {'id': 'c_02'}):

    for divtag_0201 in divtag_c02.find_all('div', {'id': 'c_0201'}):

      divtag_hwdt1 = divtag_0201.find('div', {'id': 'c_headlines_wdt_1'})

      for divtag_topnl in divtag_hwdt1.find_all('div',

       {'class': 'top-newslist'}):

        for ultag in divtag_topnl.find_all('ul',{'class': 'clearfix'}):

          for litag in ultag.find_all('li'):

            for spantitle in litag.find_all('span', {'class': 'w_tle'}):

              href = spantitle.find('a')['href']

              if href.find("/", 0) == 0:

                href = "https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com" + href

                print(str(count) + ". " + spantitle.find('a')['title'] +

                      " - " + href)

                count = count + 1

if __name__ == "__main__":

  toi_topheadlines()

print("\n" + "end")

Executing the code will make it extract the HTML from the URL, parse out the required data and output the list of news headline titles and respective URLs as highlighted in the screenshot below:

News headlines scraped using Python

If you have managed to get that working, congratulations. You have scraped the top headlines and now you can use it in your own creative ways. Next, we will delve into what we did and what got us here.

Now, take a look at the portion of the source code that goes through a chain of for loops to crawl into the HTML tags. This exactly corresponds to the way that the markups are structured in the web page. You can take a look at the HTML markups by going to the browser's Developer Tools and inspecting the code behind the UI elements.

Inspecting HTML tag structure

Your program has to be tuned according to the HTML markup structure of the page that you are trying to scrape.

Part 2: Write the scraped data to a file in Google Drive

Now that our program can successfully scrape the data, in this section, we will take a step forward and write the scraped data into a JSON file in Google Drive. We will continue to use Google Colab to run the program.

For this we will mount a root folder in Google Drive and create a folder to store our files. We use a list of dictionaries and then use Python's JSON library to write the list to a JSON file. A copy of this code is available at my TOITopHeadlines v2.0 repository on Github.

# This program scrapes a web page from Times of India to extract

# top headlines and writes it to a JSON file in Google Drive.

import requests

import datetime

import json

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Prepare file location

import os

from google.colab import drive

strDriveMountLoc = '/content/drive'

strDriveTargetLoc = "/content/drive/My Drive/WebScrape/DataNewsScrapeTOI"

# Mount Google Drive

drive.mount(strDriveMountLoc)

# Create a folder in the root directory

!mkdir -p "/content/drive/My Drive/WebScrape/DataNewsScrapeTOI"

def toi_topheadlines():

  # Generate output filename based on the date and time

  dt = datetime.datetime.now()

  filename = "toi_topheadlines" + dt.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S") + ".json"

  url = "https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/headlines"

  page_request = requests.get(url)

  page_content = page_request.content

  soup = BeautifulSoup(page_content,"html.parser")

  count = 1

  txtscraped = ""

  headlines = []

  for divtag_c02 in soup.find_all('div', {'id': 'c_02'}):

    for divtag_0201 in divtag_c02.find_all('div', {'id': 'c_0201'}):

      divtag_hwdt1 = divtag_0201.find('div', {'id': 'c_headlines_wdt_1'})

      for divtag_topnl in divtag_hwdt1.find_all('div',

       {'class': 'top-newslist'}):

        for ultag in divtag_topnl.find_all('ul',{'class': 'clearfix'}):

          for litag in ultag.find_all('li'):

            for spantitle in litag.find_all('span', {'class': 'w_tle'}):

              href = spantitle.find('a')['href']

              if href.find("/", 0) == 0:

                href = "https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com" + href

                print(str(count) + ". " + spantitle.find('a')['title'] +

                      " - " + href)

                thisheadline = {

                    "sn": count,

                    "title": spantitle.find('a')['title'],

                    "href": href

                }

                headlines.append(thisheadline)

                count = count + 1

  with open(strDriveTargetLoc + '/' + filename, "a") as f:

    f.write(json.dumps(headlines, indent=2))

if __name__ == "__main__":

  toi_topheadlines()

print("\n" + "end")

Executing the code in Google Colab will display a prompt to connect to Google Drive and then take you through a series of pages to authenticate using your Google id. Once you are past the authentication the code should execute and create a JSON file in the folder path that you chose in the program. Below you can see how a list of files would look like.

JSON files in Google Drive

The content of the JSON file would look similar to what you see below.

The JSON output

In Conclusion

A word of caution on using the web scraping method is that while many websites don't mind, there are many who don't like it. It is best to go through their terms of service to understand the limitations they apply to what you can do with the data and ensure that you are not in violation. Another important point to remember is that many websites periodically change their look and feel hence modifying the structure of the HTML. On the face of such changes, your web scraping logic may fall flat, hence web scrapers need continuous maintenance. A better way to capture and harvest such data is to use APIs published by the web sites. This demonstration is for academic purposes only.

Happy scraping!

Ohio Electricity Litigation Settlement Distribution Payouts

Customers of First Energy Ohio today received an email with the subject Ohio Electricity Litigation: Your Digital Payment is Ready stating the distribution of settlement fund against Smith v. FirstEnergy Corp., et al., Case No. 2:20-cv-3755.

For a background, this is based out of two class action lawsuits against FirstEnergy and Energy Harbor, alleging that they engaged in a bribery scheme to pass a law that increased electricity rates for some Ohio residents. The lawsuits have reached a settlement of $49 million for the affected customers. Customers who have paid any rates or fees under Ohio House Bill 6 ("HB 6") from January 1, 2020 to June 22, 2022 to Toledo Edison, Cleveland Electric, or Ohio Edison, may be eligible for a payment out of this settlement.

The official website for the class action lawsuit is here.

Below is the text of the email.

Ohio Electricity Litigation settlement distribution email

Getting the payment involves clicking on a button to receive a Virtual Prepaid Mastercard which can be added to your preferred digital wallet (Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay).

Virtual Prepaid Mastercard

Data Visualization using Sankey diagrams

Sankey diagrams are a great way of visualizing the flow of data, where the width of each flow is based on its quantity or relative weight. Like a picture that speaks more than a thousand words, a Sankey diagram speaks more than a thousand pie charts. Perfect use cases of these diagrams are to visualize the flow of materials and money, but there is no limit on how creatively they can be used.

Here is a sample Sankey that shows the vacation budget flowing into different heads.

Sankey diagram for a vacation budget

The example below shows a monthly budget split into multi-level heads.

Sankey diagram for a monthly budget

The example below shows inflation-adjusted revenue from music sales based on media format from 1973 till 2019. Data source RIAA.

Sankey diagram for music revenue based on media type sales

Below are some resources where you can create Sankey diagrams.

SankeyDiagram.net

Sample at SankeyDiagram.net

I kept this in the beginning of the list because it is the simplest to use. Creating Sankey diagrams at SankeyDiagram.net is very easy to use and free. Just go to the website, enter your data and see the diagram evolve in real time. It has a simple input format, a few settings and the ability to export the diagram in various formats like PNG and SVG. It automatically selects colors for you and also lets you specify colors for each flow. A useful feature here is that you can use a '?' for the program to automatically calculate the value based on the lower nodes. Thanks to Jonas Lorenz for creating and publishing this open-source tool.

SankeyMATIC.com

Sample at SankeyMATIC

SankeyMATIC.com has a UI which is loaded with lots of customizations to choose from. There are controls to help customize the size of the canvas, margins, heights and spacing of nodes, default colors, opacity, curviness etc. The data input format is simple and it provides you a choice to select predefined coloring themes. With this tool, also have total control of the opacity, font positioning, size and highlighting. It lets you export the diagram as a PNG at a size of your choice. I really miss the ability to let it auto-calculate the values of higher nodes based on the values in the lower ones.

Sankey Diagram Generator by Dénes Csala

Sample at Sankey Diagram Generator

This free Sankey diagram generator at sankey.csaladen.es provides a lot of control on the configuration part. Each flow can be defined more definitively in terms of colors and layers. The nodes can be freely moved around the canvas by dragging with the mouse pointer. The application lets you save the diagram as a PNG image. Thanks to Dénes Csala for creating and publishing this open-source tool.

Sankey using Google Charts

Sample at Google Charts

If you are okay with a bit of HTML and JavaScript programming, Google Charts has a chart library that you can embed in your web page and display interactive charts. The Sankey diagram will be rendered using HTML5/SVG technology to provide cross-browser compatibility (including VML for older IE versions) and cross platform portability to iPhones, iPads, and Android. There are loads of options to customize which I will cover in a later post. Head over to Google Charts' Sankey Diagram for more details on how to create these charts.

The simple Sankey diagram below was made with Google Charts and depicts the top 10 Wikipedia pages and their source based on page views for the year 2022. Hover your mouse pointer, or tap, over the nodes and flows to see the data. [Data source: Wikipedia] [static image sample]

The Sankey diagram below, which was made with Google Charts, shows UK studio albums released by The Beatles grouped into genres. [Data source: Wikipedia] [static image sample]

You will come across many other tools to create Sankey diagrams. The ones I chose to write about here are the ones that are freely accessible and fairly easy to use. Sankey diagrams can be used to depict much more complex scenarios of data or materials flow. If you have a comment, please drop it in the comments section below.

Today I Learned about the Peter principle

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. Read more.

Sling TV Rapidly Losing Subscribers

Live streaming television provider Sling TV has been rapidly losing its subscriber base over several quarters now. In its latest press release here and here, parent company DISH TV reported a subscriber base of 2.003 million in 2023 Q2 for Sling TV, which is a loss of 97,000 over the previous quarter. This makes it 3 quarters in a row where Sling TV has lost subscribers with 234,000 in 2023 Q1 and 77,000 in 2022 Q4. In a similar trend, it had also lost subscribers for 3 quarters in a row starting 2021 Q4 during which it lost 359,000 subscribers.

Among popular streaming live TV providers in the market today is YouTube TV whose subscriptions run at $72.99 per month and includes 100+ live channels. Other popular ones are Hulu, Fubo, Philo, and DirecTV Stream. As of August 2023, Sling TV is available only in the US and packages start from $40 a month.

TechCrunch writes, Sling TV struggles to keep subscribers, drops nearly 100K users in Q2 here.

Music I am listening to in 2023

Here is a quick log of the music albums that I have been listening to this year.

1. 4 Pieces: A Tribute to Ludovico Einaudi / Jacob's Piano
2. ÷ (Deluxe) / Ed Sheeran
3. A Scandinavian Thing / Peter Sandberg
4. Ain't No Mountain High Enough / Mark Maxwell
5. All the Little Lights (Deluxe Version) / Passenger
6. Anthology / Grover Washington, Jr.
7. Appetite For Destruction / Guns N' Roses
8. Bar Jazz Masterpieces / New York Jazz Lounge
9. Blue Train (Expanded Edition) / John Coltrane
10. Breezin' / George Benson
11. Bright Future / Peder B. Helland
12. Chet Baker In Tokyo (The Complete Concert) / Chet Baker
13. Coltrane's Sound / John Coltrane
14. Dance of Life / Peder B. Helland
15. Dark Night of the Soul / Philip Wesley
16. Delirium (Deluxe) / Ellie Goulding
17. El Paraiso Músical / Geova Eucarin
18. Feels So Good / Chuck Mangione
19. Funky Jazz Masterpieces, Vol. 3 / New York Jazz Lounge
20. Homecoming / David Hazeltine
21. I Put A Spell On You / Nina Simone
22. Idle Moments / Grant Green
23. It Might As Well Be Swing / Frank Sinatra
24. Jazz - Instrumental Pop Jazz / Smooth Jazz Sax Instrumentals
25. JORDI (Deluxe) / Maroon 5
26. Kabir Singh / Various Artists
27. Kind Of Blue (Legacy Edition) / Miles Davis
28. Love In The Future (Deluxe Edition) / John Legend
29. Method in the Madness / Nocturnal Spirits
30. Moanin' (Expanded Edition) / Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
31. MTV Unplugged In New York / Nirvana
32. My Brazilian Heart / Joyce Partise
33. My One and Only Love / David Ehrlin & Razz T
34. Nostalgia / Annie Lennox
35. Nothing But The Best / Frank Sinatra
36. On Golden Pond - Relaxing Piano / Relaxing Piano
37. Only Human (Deluxe) / Calum Scott
38. Rainy Days / Peder B. Helland
39. Rang De Basanti (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) / A.R. Rahman
40. Rising Son / Takuya Kuroda
41. Say Something / A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera
42. Shape of You / Ed Sheeran
43. Standing By / Ben E King
44. Sunny Mornings / Peder B. Helland
45. Takin' Off (Expanded Edition) / Herbie Hancock
46. The Best - Reminiscent 10th Anniversary / Yiruma
47. The Best of Soul, R&B, Smooth Jazz / Denise King & Massimo Faraò Trio
48. The Light of Day / James 'PJ' Spraggins
49. The Nova Collection, Vol. 1 / Nova
50. The Situation Five to Nine / Stevo Rap Guru
51. Time Out / The Dave Brubeck Quartet
52. Trilogy: Past, Present & Future / Frank Sinatra
53. Triple W / ThaMac10
54. You Are Not Alone / Kim Waters
55. Winelight / Grover Washington, Jr.
56. Shree Hanuman Chalisa / Lata Mangeshkar
57. Simple Pleasures / Bobby McFerrin
58. Somethin' Else (Rudy Van Gelder Edition) / Cannonball Adderley
59. Sunny Mornings / Peder B. Helland
60. x (Deluxe Edition) / Ed Sheeran

X taking away Twitter handles

X, formerly called Twitter, has taken away many handles to the dismay of its long-time users. Some of the handles that are knows to have been taken away are below:

@x

@twittermusic

@twittersports

@twittermovies

@twittertv

@music

@sports

@tv

@movies

Sarah Bregel writes in details on Fast Company here. Mashable writes about it here.

Sweet Home 3D for Home Interior Design

Sweet Home 3D is a free open-source home interior designing application which you can use to draw floor plans and design the interiors of your home. It has a drag-and-drop user interface with a built-in searchable furniture catalog to add living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and furniture to your designs. And it is very easy to use.

I have played around with this application on several occasions since 2013 and it has always been an interesting experience with its ease of use. The application lets you import a floor plan which helps as a guide to draw a 2D plan of the walls and rooms after which you can start adding elements like furniture and appliances. Side-by-side, the plan can be previewed in 3D with all the object that you put in there.

The application provides two points of view to preview the design: the top point of view in which you can view the house from above and the human observer point of view which lets you render a realistic view of the interiors.

Sweet Home 3D can be installed on a Windows, macOS or a Linux computer. It can also be used online with a supported browser.

Here I am putting out some simple illustrations of the design capabilities that this application has to demonstrate the look and feel of the online version of the application. Remember that it can create very simple to very complex floor plans including plans that consists of multiple floors.

Set 1

Set 2

The application is located here at sweethome3d.com.

The development project is located here at SourceForge.

 

Meta blocks news on Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada

Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta, is preventing users in Canada to post or view news content. In June 2023, the Canadian government passed its Online News Act, Bill C-18, which requires big tech giants like Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms. Darren Major writes about the event here on CBC. Here is a full text of the act.