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Now Where Was I ? (Or What am I doing in these sidetrack rooms?)

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So where was I ? To be honest, I was now supposed to be re-drawing the flow chart for my abbreviations Xpander project. And supposedly also adding the pre-fix controls part. As well as initializing the consecutive -taps counters for the pre-fix controls (e,g, Shift, Ctrl, Alt, Menu, Windows = SCAMW) and for the post-fix controls (e.g., P3 and P4) But instead I find myself playing around with some distracting code that flashes colorful boxes across the console screen. It's not all for naught though. A small part of it is meant to support the pre-fix control responses where a small helper message pops out but soon thereafter disappears in response to the c onsecutive-taps counters for the prefixes (SCAMW) being non-zero (meaning the user has hit the pre- or post-fix control keys one or more consecutive times). The helper message tells the user what the effect of the taps will be and recycles to 1 tap if the number of taps exceeds a max.   The below flash dance function uses the \r es...
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Change of Plans / Change of Perspective

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Did I start my initial storyboarding for my "Xpander" Project ( here ) from a Middle-out  Point of View (mo-POV) rather than from a Bottom-up (bu-POV) one and did that starting point cause me to miss some vital concepts that should have been obvious if I had focused on the bottom rung, physical layer instead of jumping to a higher, abstracted level (i.e., physical key presses converted into symbolic characters) ? Seems to be so ... I should have started with keyboard layout and  the raw basics of a user's fingers pressing down on specific keys of the keyboard according to some sequence and timing, and perhaps holding down one or more of the keys for respective times and then finally releasing them perhaps all at once or according to another sequence. Then I would have perceived the possible permutations. I did not. [ edit insert : Wikipedia has cool page re IBM keybd here ] In general, keys such as SHIFT, CTRL, ALT, WIN, MENU act as pre-fix commands that are activate...
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Back to Basics after My Code Chokes from Bloat

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Do you remember these ? Humility. Simplicity (KISS) Frugality.  They are some of the principles we are taught to keep in mind as we add more and more code to our projects. Alas. I strayed off this trail-marked path. And now my initial Xpander project modules are crashing during compilation due to a host of never ending syntax errors. So it's time to start all over with a clean slate. Back to Basics. Return to Roots. A New Beginning. But wait. I hear that "UV" is the superior way to launch a new project. How do you install and use UV as a beginner?   ( <-- YouTube search results)     ^^^-- Astral install site here     ^^^-- TwT's answer here     ^^^--  Corey Schafer's  answer here     ^^^-- Josh's answer here     ^^^-- Indently search results ::: UV here (includes TOML)     ^^^-- How to Use UV in PyCharm Shaw ::: The Fastest Way to Install (and Use) Python Indently's advanced UV commands here LATER IN TI...
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Typewriter Echo Mode for my Xpander Project (a.k.a. 2nd OOP project)

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So far I've been operating on the premise that my expandable text (that which is to be expanded by the Xpander module) is going to come in from a pre-existing file. However, another use case is that where the user is inputting original text via the keyboard and expects to see his/her keystrokes immediately echoed on the console. In that case, I will need to send each keystroke to two two different destinations: (1) first to the console and (2) secondly to my three parsing buffers (Buff_0, Buff_1 and Buff_2). If an abbreviation expansion is triggered by the incoming text, I will have to erase part of the text on the console and replace it with its expanded counter part.   I don't remember if there is a clear-current-console-line escape code that will work on my computer's console. Time to go back and research the issue. ... TO BE CONTINUED I should storyboard the plan per own advice about storyboarding before coding: I only need one function, not a bunch of instances as was...
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Enough Goofing Off (in a Dopamine Hole), Time to Dive into Hard Tasks Again

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This post is part of a showcase of how a " story board " is invaluable in helping to develop the code (e.g. Python) for implementing the desired outcome. [more on storyboarding ( here ),  ( here ), and  ( here )] In my previous post ( here ) I took a pass at explaining my below, "partial" flowchart for my "Xpander" project.  Now it's time to explain the details, this again happening well BEFORE writing any of the corresponding Python code. (click on the image to enlarge it, back a page to return to here) (or get image separately  here ) Just to recap the overall scheme:     (a) First,  I decided I was going to parse the incoming text into three buckets, or buffer "lists" (as I will be implementing them). The decision of which buffer to dump the next incoming piece of text into is performed by a three state, sequential state machine having states S0, S1, S2 and then looping back to S0. [Post script: A new idea just came to me : Add a f...
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Retreating to Obsidian Again for Sake of Re-Setting and Re-framing

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For reasons not apparent to my conscious self, I felt a pressing need to break off from my Xpander project ( here ) and retreat to the comfort of generating a bunch of Obsidian notes and of "relaxing" and reading a bunch of Reddit posts. Doing this, of course, raises the red flag of me engaging in a Dopamine-driven avoidance of the hard tasks. It reinforces my counter-productive habit of constantly retreating to the comfort of mindless collecting and hoarding of bookmark conten t . [ specific e.g. here ]  ... Come to think of it as an aside here, I think I found an answer to how to organize my Blogger bookmarks. The answer is to work backwards ! First locate the titles of my posts here on Blogger and then, using those; create folders in my weekly bookmark saves with the same names. For example, create a "Brain Boosters" folder under my "Learning" [about Lea r ning] major-tab, create an "Every __ explained" folder under my "Other Sw" maj...
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I Was Wrong About Being Wrong

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In my previous post ( here ), I concluded that I was heading down the wrong solution path with my Abbreviations* "Xpander" code. [* = Actually abbreviations plus scripts & url's] Now I take it back. Well, at least partially.  I was wrong about being wrong. Two wrongs do make a write -- meaning, something to write about. The two oopsies could operate as a double hit on my fragile ego (a.k.a. my Dunning-Kruger  based confidence about always being right, about my brain's concocted models of the universe and them being 101% correct despite my lack of full knowledge of the universe ). One reason I was wrong in this particular case (wrong about being totally wrong) is because my initial "thought experiment(s)" did  provide useful insights . I now more clearly understand what problems I'm facing in coding up the Xpander project. link for image source is ( here ),  more of Bob's Banter ( here ) and also ( here ) about staying motivated Some additional in...
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