Tag: python

Auto Texter – send random SMS using Python and Google Voice API

Posted on by Germfil
Category:Projects, Technical
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TLDR  :)= You can find full project on github – https://github.com/jaronphillips/MotivationalTexter

This has been a fun project. It could easily be turned into some kind of fun prank.   What started out as a joke from my sister-in-law has turned into something quite fun for me.  My wife and her sister asked me to help with some fitness goals.  Normally I would pay no attention to such a request, but this one gave me a fun idea. I wanted to randomly text them throughout the day to remind them to focus on fitness. I also wanted to automate it. I figured it would be a good python project.

First I needed to figure out if this was  possible.   I googled something like  “python text message.”  There is plenty of stuff that popped up, but most of it was for Twilio, and you had to purchase a phone number. Well, I was not that invested in this project. I did not want to pay for a new phone number…  especially when google offers free ones with google voice.   I googled something like “python google voice sms” and found this wonderful blog by Motion Design https://motiondesigntechnology.wordpress.com/2014/01/24/mass-texting-sms-messaging-via-google-voice-and-python/

Now we are off to the races! The googlevoice function made this pretty easy. You can send a text from python with just a few lines of code:

from googlevoice import Voice
gv=Voice()
gv.login()
gv.send_sms("7204369797","Hey there tubby")

Now we read from a list of phone numbers and we can send everyone on that list a text:

ListOfNumbers="PhoneNumbers.txt"
PhoneList=open(ListOfNumbers, "r")
PhoneNumbers=PhoneList.read().splitlines()
for PhoneNumber in PhoneNumbers:
     gv.send_sms("7204369797","Hey there tubby")

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Secret Santa picker with Python

Posted on by Germfil
Category:Projects, Technical
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I just made a Secret Santa Picker with Python! Isn’t that a fun thing to say…
I am still trying to become a more useful human, I keep hearing everywhere that people need to know how to code. I am attempting to learn Python by doing useful things. I cannot learn by just reading a book and absorbing information, I have to have a goal to accomplish. I need a project to pursue.
Today one of my family members mentioned our annual Secret Santa game. We usually pick out of a hat, but now we are spread out all over the country so picking out of a hat is not going to be easy. I figured this would be a good challenge to put my python skills to the test. My new project was to make a Secret Santa picker. I knew I was going to use Python’s random library.  After playing with random.shuffle, I tried random.sample. This seemed to work much better for what I wanted to do.

If you don’t wanna read this whole thing you can just jump straight to the code and start using it – – https://github.com/germfil/SecretSanta

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Face recognition and jpg Metadata Tagging – using Facebox and ExifTool

Posted on by Germfil
Category:Projects, Technical
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I have been working on a fun little project this week. Like most people, I have thousands of unorganized photos on my home network, they are in random folders all over the place.  I know I have photos of weddings, birthdays, hikes, vacations, etc..  but they are buried in random places all over my network. Sometimes they are in a folder with a descriptive name like ‘Moab 2008’ but sometimes they were dumped in a hurry and ended up in a folder like ‘crap from phone.’  Last week I was in charge of making a wedding video for my sister in law, I know have lots of pics of her, but I was searching through folders for at least an hour and only came up with a few.  The face grouping on Google Photos helped a little, but some of these photos have been around a lot longer than Google Photos.  I need some way to organize my photos locally.  That is where Facebox comes in…

Facebox is a piece of software made by MachineBox (https://machinebox.io/).  They claim to be super easy to use and be able to start recognizing photos in just a few minutes.  I have actually wanted to test this out for a couple months, but it seemed to be an intimidating project. I thought I would have to learn a bunch of complicated stuff before I could actually use it.  Turns out it actually is pretty easy to use. All you have to do is send two POST commands to a webservice end point.

The first command  is to teach a face:
curl -X POST -F ‘file=@/home/jaron/jaronteach.jpg’ ‘http://localhost:8080/facebox/teach?name=jaron&id=jaronteach.jpg’

The second command is check a photo for faces:
curl -X POST -F ‘file=/home/jaron/test.jpg’ ‘http://localhost:8080/facebox/check’

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