Simon Willison’s Weblog

Setting up Datasette, step by step (via) Tobias describes how he runs Datasette on his own server/VPS, using nginx and systemd. I’m doing something similar for some projects and systemd really does feel like the solution to the “ensure a Python process keeps running” problem I’ve been fighting for over a decade. I really like how Tobias creates a dedicated Linux user for each of his deployed Python projects.

# 21st October 2019, 2:20 am / sysadmin, datasette

2018 Central Park Squirrel Census in Datasette (via) The Squirrel Census project released their data! 3,000 squirrel observations in Central Park, each with fur color and latitude and longitude and behavioral observations. I love this data so much. I’ve loaded it into a Datasette running on Glitch.

# 16th October 2019, 6:01 pm / squirrels, datasette

goodreads-to-sqlite (via) This is so cool! Tobias Kunze built a Python CLI tool to import your Goodreads data into a SQLite database, inspired by github-to-sqlite and my various other Dogsheep tools. It’s the first Dogsheep style tool I’ve seen that wasn’t built by me—and Tobias’ write-up includes some neat examples of queries you can run against your Goodreads data. I’ve now started using Goodreads and I’m importing my books into my own private Dogsheep Datasette instance.

# 14th October 2019, 4:07 am / dogsheep, books, datasette, sqlite, cli

SQL Murder Mystery in Datasette (via) “A crime has taken place and the detective needs your help. The detective gave you the  crime scene report, but you somehow lost it. You vaguely remember that the crime  was a murder that occurred sometime on ​Jan.15, 2018 and that it took place in SQL  City. Start by retrieving the corresponding crime scene report from the police  department’s database.”—Really fun game to help exercise your skills with SQL by the NU Knight Lab. I loaded their SQLite database into Datasette so you can play in your browser.

# 7th October 2019, 11:37 pm / datasette, projects, sql, sqlite

genome-to-sqlite. I just found out 23andMe let you export your genome as a zipped TSV file, so I wrote a little Python command-line tool to import it into a SQLite database.

# 19th September 2019, 3:58 pm / projects, datasette, genetics, sqlite

healthkit-to-sqlite. Ever since I got an Apple Watch I’ve been itching to get my hands on the step tracking and health data that it’s been collecting for me. I know it’s there in a SQLite database on my wrist, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it! A few days ago I stumbled across the “Export Health Data” button in the iOS Health app, and it turns out it creates a zip file containing XML with a full dump of the data collected by Apple Health. healthkit-to-sqlite is the tool I’ve built that can read that export and use it to create a SQLite database ready to be queried and explored with Datasette. It’s a pretty basic implementation but it’s already giving me access to over 3 million rows of data. Lots of potential here for interesting work with personal analytics.

# 22nd July 2019, 3:34 am / dogsheep, health, datasette, sqlite

Unlocking the Department of State’s foreign military training data for good this time (via) I’m so excited about this: Security Force Monitor used Datasette to publish a 200,000 row database of training engagements between the US military and foreign military units, based on their own massive efforts to clean up the official data (from thousands of PDF files). This is pretty much my dream use-case for Datasette, and their future goals are inspiring: “Our hope is that when the next report arrives in a short few months, we will be able to turn it into machine readable data and pass it around the sector in minutes, rather than months.”

# 20th July 2019, 4:42 am / datasette