To send a message to a Telegram channel using Python, first of all it is required to create a Telegram bot.
While creating the Telegram bot you will get an apiToken and a chatID that will be used in a Python script to access the Telegram API and send the message.
In this note you will find the examples of the Python scripts for sending messages, images, etc. to Telegram through the API. (more…)
To write something to a file or to read the content of a file in Python it is required to open() and close() the file properly.
The best practice in Python is to read/write to a file by using the with statement – the replacement for commonly used try...finally error-handling statements.
The with statement ensures that the file is closed when the block inside it is exited.
This note shows the best practice Python examples of how to write to a file or read the file’s content and save it to a variable. (more…)
Selenium is an open source tool for web browsers automation that is widely used in tandem with Python to test web applications.
As these tests are often automated and run on dedicated nodes, there is a sense to run Selenium in a headless mode, i.e. without opening a browser.
This note shows how to run headless Selenium in Python on the example of Chrome and Firefox browsers controlled by a ChromeDriver and GeckoDriver correspondingly. (more…)
Selenium is an open source tool that automates web browsers and is widely used for automated testing of web applications.
With Python and Selenium you can easily create a script that searches a web-page for a button containing a particular text and clicks on it.
This note shows an example of how to find a button by text and click on it using Selenium and Python. (more…)
When a laptop lid is getting closed, different scenarios are possible: do nothing, blank screen, suspend or shutdown.
In Linux Mint, the system behavior on closing the lid is controlled by the “Power Management” and “Screensaver” settings.
This note shows how to enable or disable screen locking when closing the lid in Linux Mint. (more…)
It may happen that you execute a Python script and nothing happenes, i.e. it seems that it “hangs” without showing any output.
Even if you explicitly include some print() statements to debug the issue, it may still not print anything to a terminal.
One of the reasons of why your Python script does not show any output is because it buffers stdout and stderr steams instead of printing them.
This also can happen if you execute the Python script from a CI/CD pipeline (e.g. using Jenkins, Gitlab-CI, TeamCity, etc.) or if you run it using a Dockerfile.
This short note shows how to solve the issue when the Python script “hangs” and doesn’t show any output. (more…)
In Ansible, if you run a task that has some module’s parameter with a variable that is not set you will get “The task includes an option with an undefined variable” error.
If for some reason you can’t or don’t want to define this variable, you can make it optional.
In this case Ansible will ignore the parameter with the optional variable if it is not defined.
This note shows how to skip a module’s parameter in Ansible if a variable is not defined. (more…)
User profiles in Windows on the most of computers are usually located in the folder C:\users\.
By default, the user folder name is the same as you user name.
But if you change your user name, the old name of your user folder will remain and you may want to rename it as well.
The renaming of the user folder in Windows is not so straightforward, but i will show how to do this in a quick, safe and easy way. (more…)
A password expiration is a feature in Windows that forces users to change their passwords after a certain number of days.
When it is time to change your password, Windows will send you a “Consider changing your password” notification.
In this note i will show several ways of how to disable the password expiration of a local user account in Windows. (more…)
There may be different reasons for changing a local user account name in Windows.
For example, you may want to change the name on the sign-in screen to your actual name instead of the nickname or vice versa.
This short note describes the easiest way of changing a user name of the local account in Windows. (more…)