This is part 3 of a 4 part series of articles where I explain how I discovered and purchased my laptop by building a web application which scrapes a local PC parts forum and sends automated email alerts when posts featuring specific keywords appear:
Celery is a distributed task queue framework. In conjunction with a message broker (in my case Redis) it can be used to process asynchronous tasks as well as schedule periodic tasks. I am using both of these features:
A periodic task is run every 5 minutes to initiate the Scrapy CarbSpider to scrape and scan the first page of the Carbonite Laptop forum index page for new threads featuring search phrases of interest.
From within the CarbPipeline activity I push asynchronous email tasks for Celery to handle. This separates the sending of my email notifications from the parsing of the thread metadata.
This is part 2 of a 4 part series of articles where I explain how I discovered and purchased my laptop by building a web application which scrapes a local PC parts forum and sends automated email alerts when posts featuring specific keywords appear:
In order to manage the search phrases and email addresses I am using Django. Django is a Python web framework, and is known for including many extras right out of the box. I am taking advantage of two specific extras: Django’s built-in ORM and the Django admin console.
This is part 1 of a 4 part series of articles where I explain how I discovered and purchased my laptop by building a web application which scrapes a local PC parts forum and sends automated email alerts when posts featuring specific keywords appear:
Part 1: Let Your Next Laptop Find YOU! (this page)
CarbAlert is a web application which scrapes a local (South African) second-hand computer parts forum for new posts offering laptops featuring keywords of interest (specifically the first page of the “laptops” forum) I’m using Django for the admin console and database/ORM integration, Scrapy for web-scraping, Celery for task management, Flower for task monitoring and Mailgun for sending out alert emails. I am using Docker to manage and run the containers which make up the CarbAlert application.
Overview After a recent sinus/ear infection I began to experience tinnitus. In my case it presents itself as a constant high frequency static hiss/whine in my left ear. It’s been about a month since I first noticed it. Hopefully it will eventually disappear. During the day when I’m at work or around friends I don’t really notice it. However when I’m in a quiet room, such as when falling asleep or in the early morning after waking up, it is quite noticeable and distracting.
Overview I’m working on a project which requires a character LCD to work with a Raspberry Pi. A character LCD is thing displaying the text in the image above. The one I am currently using is a “green backlit 16x2” character LCD. This means that the display is capable of displaying 2 rows of 16 characters, and it features black characters on a green background. There are various sizes and colour combinations (text and backlight) available.
As described in a previous post, I have set up a GitLab CI runner to build and deploy this blog.
For obvious content changes it is easy to see if they have been applied - I can just visit the site itself. For changes that are a bit more “behind the scenes” it may not be so easy to determine if and what changes have been applied. For example: updating the version of Hugo used by the GitLab CI runner to generate the site.
