Python Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

A screenshot of a file format (fmt/983) in 0xffae. The title 0xffae sits over the top of the original image.

File formats as Emoji: 0xffae

tldr: https://emoji.exponentialdecay.co.uk

File Formats As Emoji (0xFFAE or 0xffae) might be my most random file format hack yet. Indeed, it is a random page generator! But it generates random pages of file formats represented as Emoji.

The idea came in 2016 with radare releasing a new version that supported an emoji hexdump. I wondered whether I could do something fun combining file formats and the radare output to create a web-page.

Along came a spare moment one weekend, some pyscript, and bit of sqlite, et voilà. File Formats as Emoji (0xFFAE) was made a reality.

Lovebot by Matthew Del Degan. Taken in Toronto in 2017.

simpledroid: completing the loop

It’s nearing the end of 2024 and that must mean a PRONOM hackathon as part of the World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2024).

My contribution is a follow-up on my work earlier in the year to produce a valid DROID signature file from Wikidata in wddroidy.

PRONOM release statistics

My contribution to PRONOM research week 2023 (held in November 2023) is a PRONOM summary website and Application Programming Interface…

What is the checksum of a directory? Introducing sumfolder1

In Fractal in detail: What information is in a file-format identification report? I describe the different ways of dissecting the information in a file-format identification report.

A file-format identification report is a data-rich artifact created during the processing of digital collections.

I had the idea of using this type of report to attach a checksum to an archival collection (files, and directories) as a whole. This is done using methods akin to a Merkle Tree, similar to those in source control systems such as Git, and Web3 Blockchain projects like Bitcoin.

This project is called sumfolder1.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, overlook the PDP-11.

$man bot: homage to Thompson and Ritchie and the Linux man pages

A departure from my first, and revamped Twitter bot, I was inspired at work to create a more functional bot,…

Dynamic avatars on Twitter

The visualization tells me that the first publication from my Twitter bot, created to dynamically update my avatars daily was 20 December 2012. My bot was a simple Python script that generated images in binary to represent the day of the month.