Python Posts

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0.1. This release has no major changes in it and is solely about addressing security issues in many of the underlying libraries used by petfeedd. To install it or upgrade from previous versions, you can simply run: docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest

After five beta releases and months of testing, I am happy to announce petfeedd Version 1.0 is now available. All changes from the beta branch have been merged in and the release is now available on Docker Hub. To install it or upgrade from Version 0.2, you can simply run: docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest And restart. It should perform all the upgrades needed for version 1.0.

Twelve years ago I wrote a little program called Dystill. It is a filtering mail delivery agent that could sort and filter email based on rules stored in a MySQL database. At the time I wrote it, I was transitioning away from using Gmail to running my own mail server, and I needed a way to filter my incoming mail into folders (akin to Gmails labels and automatic filtering) with the ability to quickly add rules without having to manually edit files. And for twelve years, that little program has just run reliably in the background with very few updates. The last time I changed it was 2012. In the meantime, the world has moved on and Python 2 (which it was written in) is no longer supported. And truthfully it was the last piece of Python 2 code in my whole setup. But I had been punting on updating it because it worked.

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0. It’s been almost three years since the last release of petfeedd (version 0.2.2), and Version 1.0 marks a new start for this project. I have been running the beta release on my feeders for the last week and I believe I have smashed all the major bugs.

petfeedd, the software for pet feeders, has a new release. 0.2.2 is a maintenance release that add support for new Raspberry Pi Hardware. There are no breaking changes in this release.

I’ve been on the Internet a long time, since the early to mid 1990s. And when you are on the Internet that long, you tend to leave a pretty long trail behind you. But over the years that trail gets overgrown as sites close, lists vanish, and machines crash. There is precious little left from those early years. One thing that has persisted to this time, despite being pretty heavily neglected over the years, is Yahoo Groups. Those who remember the first dot-com boom may remember that Yahoo Groups was not originally Yahoo Groups. It was eGroups, which Yahoo bought and merged into their own sprawling empire. eGroups basically made it possible for anyone to set up a mailing list without needing access to a listserv service. Well, it looks like the end has finally come for Yahoo Groups. Verizon, the new owner of the rotting corpse of Yahoo, has announced that all groups will disappear on December 14th. I was on tons of mailing lists during my early Internet years, and I would really like to archive and preserve those messages if I could. But how could I get them out of Yahoo?

petfeedd, the daemon I wrote for my Raspberry Pi-powered cat feeders has been updated to fix a number of bugs people were seeing attempting to install it since I originally wrote it in 2017. Perhaps the biggest change is Docker support! That’s right, if you just want to run petfeedd, now you can do it in just three commands! No more installing various libraries and things (but that approach still works as well.)

As with many of my projects, it started with something that made me angry. In this case, it was this: The Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder. Okay, let’s back up a little bit. Back to about 8 or so years ago. We had a cat at the time, Pumpkin, who as objectively not a good cat. She was foul tempered on the best of days and very difficult to love. But she was my wife and I’s first pet, so we did love her all the same. She had a habit of wanting food precisely on time. And if it was late, she would raise all manner of noise until she was fed. Often this came at some ungodly early time in the morning. So I bought a Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder.

So I’ve been doing a bit of Python recently for a project I’m working on on a Raspberry Pi. There will be a longer blog post about that in the next few weeks. But one thing I ran up against was that I wanted to start my daemon, written in Python, using a systemd service on Raspbian. Normally, you would just shove a script invocation into a systemd unit and call it good, but in my case I had made use of Pipenv, which is a bit like Bundler in the Ruby world and Composer in the PHP world, to manage my project’s dependencies.

Just a little announcement about a maintenance release to dystill. 0.2.1 has been released, which brings with it a couple of bugfixes for issues I ran into recently. First, it will now optionally try to create new maildirs when they don’t exist (this is configurable in the config file). There’s also some more error checking to hopefully prevent crazy behavior. As always, the source is on github.