29 Monday Dec 2025
The last three posts (see here, here, and here) have taken us through Python’s standard tkinter module from the basics to a simple windowed application with a text window for editing and the usual features for loading and saving text files.
I mentioned in the second post that I’d “implement a simple word-counter to replace the calculator parsing and execution code.” That’s what today’s short end-of-the-year post is about.
22 Monday Dec 2025
In the last post we used the Python tkinter module (which is standard) to build a shell window for script-based calculator app. To do anything useful, the shell needs a back-end calculator object to implement script parsing and executing functions.
In this post we’ll look at code for a script-driven prefix calculator that can be easily extended to include other (mathematical) functions.
15 Monday Dec 2025
The previous post laid out the basics for creating windowing (GUI) apps in Python using the tkinter (Tk Interface) module. The module has been part of the standard library since Python versions 2.7 and 3.1.
In this post, as a small seasonal gift, I’ll start presenting a working GUI application — a script-driven pre-fix calculator with variables. Between the calculator code and its window code, there is too much for one post, so there will be (at least) a second part next week.
24 Monday Nov 2025
Posted in Fun, Interesting, Python
Python has included the Tk interface module (tkinter) since versions 2.7 and 3.1. The module is a binding to version 8.5 of the Tk GUI suite for making windowing applications. My first installed version of Python was 2.7, so I’ve been aware of the module for over ten years but never explored it.
At the beginning of this month, I decided to dive in. It led to an intense two-week bout of 12+ hour days, but I emerged with working apps (and my sanity). This post and ones to come document and share what I’ve learned.
25 Monday Aug 2025
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Recently I found myself dividing my attention between watching the Minnesota Twins lose yet another ballgame and goofing around with an idea that popped into my head for no reason I can name.
The idea turned out better than imagined in terms of capability given its design simplicity, so I thought I’d document it here. It’s not super useful as is, but those relatively new to Python might find it educational or otherwise helpful.
12 Monday May 2025
In the previous post [see Elementary Cellular Automaton], I presented an implementation of a 1D elementary cellular automaton. Unfortunately, the code turned out to be an example of leaping into an idea without carefully reading the background information.
Long story short, while the code works and generates images, it doesn’t generate the correct images for all 256 rules. In this post, I present improved code that does.
28 Monday Apr 2025
For quite some time, I’ve wanted to write some Python code to implement and elementary cellular automaton. In particular, I wanted to “investigate” (play around with) the famous Rule 110, which is known to be Turing complete.
Despite the name, this has nothing to do with cellphones. It’s a 1D variation on the well-known 2D Game of Life designed by British mathematician John Conway. [See the John Conway’s Life and Life With Class posts for Python versions]
30 Monday Sep 2024
Some of you may have encountered the Logo programming language or one of its many offshoots. A memorable aspect of Logo was its use of turtle graphics — a form of vector graphics similar to pen plotters. Notably, turtle graphics features a relative drawing cursor.
Standard Python includes a turtle graphics module. It doesn’t have a huge production value (there’s no easy way to save an image, for instance), but it can be fun to play with.
16 Monday Sep 2024
I’ve never been particularly interested in puzzle games. Figuring out software has filled that niche for me (plenty puzzling enough). So, I’ve never done a Sudoku puzzle. Recently I read a post about Tredoku, which is a kind of three-dimensional Sudoku.
In that post was an unsolved Tredoku puzzle. I wasn’t tempted to try to solve it myself, but I did think it might be fun to see if I could write some Python to do it.
02 Monday Sep 2024
The famous Fibonacci sequence starts off [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …] and continues forever. Each number in the series, except the first two, is the sum of the previous two numbers. For example, 3+5=8.
The canonical algorithm to calculate the series uses recursion and is elegant enough to be a common example of a recursive function. But while elegant conceptually, the algorithm is deadly computationally. In this post I’ll look at several ways to dodge the bullet.
The Hard-Core Coder 