Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I wanted to get a local mirror copy of a website, but there's a lot of Python packages (as of August 2026) to do this. I decided to test 21 of them. This blog post is a human-written report of my experience using each one of these packages (as of August 2026). After reviewing them, I recommend website-downloader because it's a simple tool that does a simple task simply.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Try out Mars Globe in your browser. This is an browser app that gives you a Mars globe with several labelled landmarks. The landmarks have links to their respective Wikipedia pages. The app has several customizations for what to display, and you could simply have it as a full screen rotating Mars globe for science displays. There is no registration or subscriptions. It just works. Git repo.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Try out Make It Tiny in your browser. This is an browser app that shrinks the file sizes of images. You can optimize png, webp, jpg, and avif images in your browser without having to upload them to somebody else's server. Your images stay on your machine. There is no registration or subscriptions. It just works. Git repo. To run on your machine, you'll need to download make-it-tiny-offline.html and the other support .wasm and .js files from the git repo.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I generated a cheat sheet page for the Python datetime.datetime.strftime() and strptime() functions. I always have to look them up. But I also have it include an interactive test prompt so you can verify the output immediately, as well as several common format strings: https://inventwithpython.com/strftime
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I've been getting more interest in making zines and short-run DIY publishing since using Python to make my Choose Your Own Adventure Tic-Tac-Toe zine.. I've been trying to find local zine fests and book fairs but had trouble finding an entire list. ChatGPT came up with the following 2026 events (mostly in Japan, England, and New York) but I wanted to repost the results here. The primary sources seem to be mostly ArtBookFairs.com, Zindies.co, and Distromat.co.uk which likely have more events than the ones here. I've human-reviewed the links to make sure they go to the correct event page and the event still looks current.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
For more vibe coding experiments, I used Claude Opus 4.8 to generate some generic games in a variety of programming languages and platforms. Some work decently, others are rough, others fail altogether. The git repo is called "vibe arcade". They have varying degrees of polish and none of them are close to a commercial quality (I wouldn't pay 99 cents for them in an app store.) This design gap reminds me of the excellent talk, "Juice It or Lose It" talk at the Nordic Game Jam. The successful generations include Python and Pygame games for Asteroids, Connect Four, 2048, Memory, Othello / Reversi, Top-Down Shooter, 15 Slide Tile Puzzle, Snake, Snood, Solitaire, Space Invaders, Super Hexagon, Tetris, Whack a Mole, 2D Maze, Kirby's Avalanche, Brick Breaker, Dodge, Endless Runner, Floodit. I also generated some games in Python using the turtle module: Snake and Tetris.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Try out Mnar in your browser. The EditPlus text editor for Windows had a great feature called columnar select which let you select a rectangle of text, rather than a linear stream of characters. This has always been useful to me for small ASCII art projects of tabular data. I generated Mnar, an offline browser app that makes it easy to paste text and do columnar selection on it. Because it's an offline browser app, you can simply save the .html file and own it forever. GitHub repo
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Try out Stupid Mazes in your browser. I used Claude Code to generator an offline browser app that generates mazes with obvious solutions. You can also use it as a regular rectangular maze generator. Because it's an offline browser app, you can simply save the .html file and own it forever. GitHub repo
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I registered the domain WhatToTheSlaveIsThe4thOfJuly.com to host the text of the speech by Frederick Douglass.