Author: geekcandy

How I finally got a Python Flask app installed on Cpanel

geekcandy
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In summary:

1. Check versions! Of Python, Flask and Jinja
2. Read this really useful tutorial https://dev.to/lordghostx/how-to-host-flask-applications-on-namecheap-cpanel-299b (Thanks LordGhostX)

Okay so I’ve been meaning to figure this out for a while. Flask is a good library for letting students use the power of Python as a back end to the graphical niceties of HTML,CSS and Javascript. But we’ve been stuck to using it on Replit or Glitch which, being public sites, aren’t ideal for students who are doing their final year project and suffer the other issues of remotely hosted IDEs. So I was always interested in finding another way. Read more…

Learning about AI with Google’s Teachable Machine

geekcandy
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https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/

I’m teaching a module on Artificial Intelligence to my Year 9 students, and they are really enjoying it. Today’s lesson was about “How do we get a machine to learn” and led on to training the following machine to recognise the difference between two students.
Unfortunately, the model was taking too long to train at the end of the lesson (hint – always leave plenty of time to do this activity!) but I didn’t want to lose the value training it had done so at the end I downloaded the model and set up a page that has a webcam that will (hopefully) detect which student is standing in front of the camera. The beauty of this is that no images of the students are stored anywhere. The model has already learned all it needs and discarded the original images.

https://geekcandy.co.uk/teachablemachine/

Excel formula to count words in a cell

geekcandy
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It’s reports time again – specifically UCAS references time. And I need to write up to 140 words on each of my students.

I like using Excel for such things but was surprised there was no easy way of counting the words in each cell. I knew you could count characters using LEN() but not how to count the words…. till I found this post and this useful snippet:

=LEN(TRIM(text)) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(text, " ", "")) + 1