Raspberrypi on Matt Thornton

Basic web scraping - Part 2: thoughts on debugging and Python3

Mon, 13 May 2019 16:18:14 +0000

Update: 2020-04-13. The main article has been overhauled and republished here! Includes Python3 updates, Dropbox uploading and a code repo.

I’m leaving the below in place for info and posterity and for misc useful tidbits.

A while ago, I posted a basic tutorial on how to do some simple web scraping in Python using requests and beautifulsoup.

It obviously got found in Google because the hits were good. There were however, a couple of comments highlighting issues with it - Brett and Sean saying issues with “TypeError: ‘NoneType’ object is not callable”

MySQL on Raspberry Pi - allow connections from non-localhost

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 05:21:05 +0000

If you want to connect to MySQL from any device in your network that isn’t on localhost, then you may encounter an error:

MySQL error: Could not connect to any of the specified hosts

Bear in mind that e.g., a PHP web app or phpmyadmin will continue to work, since (assuming your web server such as Apache is running on the same server as MySQL) they’re technically running on localhost and will be able to connect.

Recovering files from broken Raspberry Pi - Part 1

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 22:17:13 +0000

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 which serves solely as a MySQL server. It does have an important (production-esque) purpose but despite that… I didn’t have it backed up properly. Oops.

So when it spectacularly died the other day, and, um… production things… stopped productioning… I worried a little. Well after I changed my pants, I worried a lot.

Not so much about the server, or even in fact the data, but the structure of the databases.

On Mono on a Raspberry Pi... vs Win10 IOT Core

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 21:55:15 +0000

Last week I posted about the setup of a RPI / Mono. Having played with a little, I’ve ultimately abandoned that line of approach.

This is not directly a reflection on Mono - no doubt the team behind that have done an incredible job of developing a platform well beyond the original intentions of the .NET framework. My main issue was that the application I’d written in a true WinDev environment didn’t just move over to the RPI / Mono environment, thus my dev cycle was broken.