Bret Lowrey

I recently wrote a better viewer for an earlier post I have on this blog. Now you can simulate discovering new technology without ever loading up Civiliation VI! As a big fan of Civilization VI, I recently decided to create a program that displays a random quote from the game,

Learning kanji can feel overwhelming, but here’s something interesting: with just 777 carefully selected kanji, you can understand over 90% of the characters you'll encounter in everyday Japanese. These kanji, originally adopted from mainland Asia over centuries, have woven themselves into the very fabric of the Japanese language, forming

While looking for a solution to display a map embedded into a web page, I came across several options. My initial idea was to use something like Google Maps or Bing Maps. Both wanted me to sign up for a developer account to get access to their APIs. Additionally, they

I've been using Python after a dry spell of using other languages. I went through the basic mechanics of the language and tried to use a wide variety of different techniques to cover most of the usage. Here's what I came up with. from random import random, randint, choice, shuffle

In my last post, I was bulk gathering GPS coordinates from the internet. After I had them, I still needed a method to display them. Luckily, Google My Maps offers a versatile import function. Every new layer can bulk import data from a variety of data formats. On Wikipedia, coordinates

I've written a lot of webscrapers in the past. Each approach I've used has its benefits and drawbacks. If I need to be able to do anything more complicated than extract some text from an HTML document, Nightmare has been my favorite way to do it. It's easy to use,