I've always wanted to see the northern lights in person, but in the meantime I experimented with capturing time-lapse video from web-cams set up on the Nature of Jokkmokk site.

While being careful not to overload the site, I set up a job to download images from one of the site's webcams every 5 minutes over a 5 day period, and found that the northern lights lit up the night of the 23rd/24th January 2013. It was then fairly simple to stitch the images from this night together using ffmpeg and some advice in Paul Rouget's blog post.

I was recently inspired by the Scala worksheet plugin for Eclipse and could see how it was a great resource for learning to program in Scala. I started working on trying to create something similar for Python.

I've hosted an initial effort hosted on Google App Engine. To try it, visit http://pyworksheet.appspot.com. You can enter Python code into the widget and press the Go button to execute it - execution results are pasted into the code as comments and the widget display is refreshed.

The widget uses the excellent CodeMirror JavaScript library (http://codemirror.net) to provide the code editor component with Python-specific smart indenting and syntax coloring (CodeMirror also supports a large number of other languanges).

This snippet, twitstreamer, is a simple command line tool, written in python3, for retrieving tweets via the twitter streaming API, v1.1. The tweets are written to standard output as CSV or JSON formatted lines.

The tool will read from either of two twitter streaming APIs.

• supply -t/--track and/or -l/--locations options to fetch matching tweets from the POST statuses/filter API
• otherwise fetch tweets from the random sample stream of all tweets - the GET statuses/sample API