Weather Trek - Weather planning for Trips

New year, more new projects! I do a good bit of traveling for work and this time of year traveling in the Midwest the weather is a constant battle. After loading up four different zipcodes on Weather.com twice a day for a few days in a row trying to get an idea of what the weather would be like while traveling on the upcoming weekend, I decided to make a simple tool to look up the information for me.

Introducing my simple tool I'm calling Weather Trek:

Like my other projects this one is written in Python and utilizes the Qt toolkit for the GUI. You can find the source code and Debian/Windows packages on the GitHub page here.

After launching the application, simply post two locations into the entries at the top and click the "Get Weather" button. Weather Trek then uses Google Maps to find the optimal route between these two cities and then looks up the five day forecast along this route on Weather.com. To get more detailed information for a particular point, you can click on the city name on any day.

The GUI and functionality is currently very simple and I am open to ideas for improvements. You can post about bugs/ideas on the GitHub page.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

Qute UI revamp and Deck Stats

A little over a week ago I posted about the first draft of my Qute MTG Stats tool. This past weekend I had some time between matches of magic to implement some new ideas I had for the project. These include:

• Adding notes to events such as deck played and decks played against
• See stats by deck for decks you've added to the event list
• Export event/opponent lists to CSV files
• Export full stats to clipboard/text file
• Save edited data to a .qute file
• Load data from a selected .qute file
• Added prompts to let the user know when actions complete successfully
• Added in application help prompt

I've also moved away from the original tabbed setup I started with to separate to allow the user to view information side by side:

For a full set of screenshots check here.

For those interested in giving this a try yourself, you can always download the latest Windows binary form here. For those using a superior operating system, simply install pyside, download the latest snapshot, and run the qutemtgstats.py

If you have any suggestions or feature ideas let me know with a comment below.

Cheers,

~Jeff Hoogland

Qute MTG Stats Tool

Late last year I wrote an Excel workbook that you could use to analyze your Magic the Gathering match history using VBA. While it was functional, being contained in an Excel workbook meant my tool was tied to closed source software and was limited by the bounds of Excel.

Today I would like to share the first draft of a new project of mine - Qute, a stand alone MTG Stats Tool:

For those interested in giving my tool a try, you can find install and usage instructions here.

The main thing I am looking for is suggestions on how to improve this tool. What information would be useful to provide that can be scrapped from the data provided in our DCI history? If you have any ideas or find any bugs drop a comment below or open up a ticket on GitHub!

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

qAndora - A Cross Platform, FOSS, Pandora Radio Player

One of my goals for this year is to become proficient in a cross platform GUI tool kit. The toolkit I've chosen to get my hands dirty with is Qt because in addition to being cross platform it also has a fantastic amount of documentation.

I always find I learn programming easier when I am building some practical instead of going through various tutorials that you just throw away when you are done. So with that, my "learn Qt" project is something I'm calling qAndora:

qAndora is a cross platform, open source, Pandora Internet Radio client written in Python using Qt and VLC. If you would like to jump right to giving this little application a try you can find install instructions here. I have tested the player successfully on Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7, but it should work anywhere you can install VLC and run Python.

A few other random screenshots of the tool:

If you have any suggestions or feature requests please feel free to leave them in a comment below.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

HOWTO: Make your QT Applications Blend In

Since Bodhi Linux includes GTK applications by default, you will find they have a fairly neutral tone that blends fairly well with the rest of the system. Beyond this Enlightenment has a built in tool for changing the look of GTK applications.

What is a person to do though when they install VLC or some other QT application for the first time and it looks like this:

First off - don't panic! It is a fairly simple/quick fix to get your QT applications to blend in with the rest of your desktop. You first simply need to install the QT theme manager - on Debian based systems such as Bodhi this can be done from the command line via:

sudo apt-get install qt4-qtconfig

Once this package is installed a new option should appear in your menu under "Preferences" labeled "Qt 4 Settings". Launching this will present you with a window the looks something like this:

Only your "GUI Style" will be something other "GTK+" by default. To change this simply select "GTK+" from the drop down menu and then close the settings manager.

You should now be all set with nicer looking QT applications:

Cheers,

~Jeff Hoogland