Old Man Learns to Code

  By "You've crossed" in the title, I actually mean I have crossed and am genuinely surprised by it. Lately, I have been incorporating TTS ( Text To Speech ) int o  my lesson plan project. In the past, any time I add a new major function such as this, I get a ton of errors when first re-launching the project. And it takes forever to isolate the problems and figure out how to fix them. This time however, other than a few undefined variable errors; it all ran on almost first try. The automated speeches for the lesson points ran right away. Shock and awe. I take it to mean that I've crossed over to a new phase of tackling my growth in Python comprehension. Don't get me wrong. I've still got miles to go . There are dozens of additional areas for me to conquer in Python beyond modules, packages, decorators and such (especially OOPs). But still. The fact that I am more organized by segregating my operations int o  different modules and developing new softw...

We see many a warning about programming students getting caught in "tutorial hell" ,  ... that meaning they watch YouTubes or other tutorials all day but never put hands to keyboard and do some coding on their own, The practice is at times analogized to watching martial art movies on TV  all day but never visiting the dojo to practice and feel what it's like to get your feet swept out from under you. Watching is not learning. The latter requires hands-on practice. But that is not what this post is about. Instead, the current focus terms here are " YouTube " and " Hoarding " per the title.    The YouTube recommendations algorithm is structured to keep you coming back for more and more lest you miss some new but temporary and slipping out of sight good posting. In other words, the need to keep watching feeds on the psychological fear of missing out and on the fear of loss and of detachment. To counter this, some of us (me) bookmark ever...

Every so often my Python code doesn't work even though it "should". I'm relying on somebody's imported module and have no idea how it works. In this case it is the PYTTSX3 module. In theory, if you follow the instructions, it will accept a text string and output the corresponding audio in a male voice or a female voice. (TTS means Text To Speech). I got it to work. But only ONCE. When called the second time ... silence. Apparently I'm not the first to experience this puzzling behavior. Look it up in Reddit, look it up in Google and you see that others also ask, "How do I get  PYTTSX3 to play more than once?" Google's AI (Gemini) offers some suggestions but none of them work. Out of frustration, I try all kinds of permutations including re-initializing the talk engine, time delays, whatever. Out of dumb luck I stumble upon a variation that suddenly makes my old Windows 10 computer perform. Why does this variation work? No idea. ( Click on ...

I had another import crash problem. This one wasn't as bad as my earlier plunge into circular import hell . Nonetheless, it took almost a week to figure out what had gone wrong. And until I finally had the answer in hand, I didn't know if this was going to be a time-consuming super hard problem or just a trivial annoyance . It turned out to be somewhere in between. Hindsight is of course, 20/20. So here below is the answer in visual form: Shown side by side are two folders, each featuring a .venv directory containing a "Package_03" of many of my self-built modules including a vars_01, funcs_01 and funcs_02 module ( click to enlarge ) It seems that my IDE (PyCharm) cobbled together a project definition (on it own? or my fault?) that mixed together modules from both directories. That caused it to report inabilities to import from one or the other of the same-named, Package_03's. I changed the names of all the files in one of these two .venv folders...