Note: this project is my first piece of Python coding. As I learn more about best practices I will refactor this. What I have right now is about 1 week's work.
Herbert Holloway was my Great, Great Uncle. He wrote up a ~400 page journal in 1918, covering the first 30 years of his life. I have had it transcribed, and am in the process of fleshing out background information, and building a web site and podcast to showcase his adventures.
Although Perl has many good image manipulation tools, I took this opportunity to give myself more exposure to Python and am trying to complete the project using only Python. I have ~700 scanned images from the journal. Because the journal pages are larger than my scanner, each page is two images. First steps are to write batch jobs to straighten the images, stitch them together, and then crop them. The second stage involves mapping the line locations in the final images to lines of text in the transcribed data to be able to show a journal snippet as part of live search results on the full text. As of July 2025, the project's status is:
As well as showcasing Herbert's life, I see this as a great opportunity to show how I can learn new technologies and apply them to a real-world problems as needed.
The web site is now live, and you can check out and run the github repo to see the image manipulation and text processing in action.
While working in a legacy Perl system, I started coming up with an approach to simplify mocking common integrations for unit tests. This is an early stage project that I am still working on, but it is already quite useful.
Take a look at the github repo. Browse the README and POD to get a better idea of what this project is attacking.