Shallowsky.com: Akkana Peck's website, covering a wide range of topics.
"Shallow Sky" encompasses the solar system: observation of our moon, the planets and their moons, comets, asteroids, and the sun. The term was invented by David North as a pun on the "Deep Sky" term long used by observers of galaxies, nebulae and other distant targets.
Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, second edition is a comprehensive guide to image editing using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for editing photographs and creating digital art. |
Jumpstarting the Raspberry Pi Zero W: Control the World Around You with a $10 Computer gets you started using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, or any other Raspberry Pi model, to control a wide assortment of hardware. Includes instructions on how to blink LEDs as well as two more detailed projects: using temperature sensors to control a fan or air conditioner, and controlling a programmable colored light string to reflect the state of Twitter or any website you choose. Also available on O'Reilly Media in both paper and electronic format, or on Amazon as a a Kindle Edition. |
If you buy the books via the Amazon links above, I get a small kickback from Amazon. No pressure, though. :-)
I enjoy speaking at conferencs and user group meetings, and have given talks on a variety of technical and semi-technical subjects.
Programs I've written, including the pho image viewer and metapho image organizer, the Saver and Pandora GIMP plug-ins, PyTopo tiled map viewer, many little astronomy apps, Crikey for mapping strings to keys, assorted useful scripts, and plenty of other free open source software.Or you can browse my Github repositories, including pho and metapho, pytopo, useful scripts and gimp-plugins, some of my dotfiles, and more.
I like to teach short courses in programming and technical subjects, such as summer workshops for high school girls in Robots and Sensors using Arduino and Javascript, and an online Python class.
Akkana's Resume
I'm a software developer specializing in Linux and open source,
and I sometimes do technical and science writing.
I'm active in the League of Women Voters, working (among other things)
for better transparency in government.
This tends to involve a lot of
web scraping,
since governments aren't very forthcoming with their data.
Good thing Python is good at scraping!
I wrote the
New Mexico Bill Tracker
to make it easier to keep an eye on bills as they move through
the state legislature;
and Los Alamos
Meetings, which scrapes the county page for government meetings
in Los Alamos County and provides an RSS feed so you can keep track
of upcoming meeting topics without downloading a pile of PDFs
every day.
With the help of the LWV New Mexico, I helped author a bill to make GIS data for all New Mexico voting districts public. I also manage the LWV NM and Fair Districts for New Mexico websites, chaired LWV Los Alamos's 2020 Digital Privacy in Government study, and am currently co-chair of the LWV New Mexico Action committee.
I enjoy welding junk metal into sculpture. You can see samples at my art website: JunkDNAArt.com.
I've been an amateur astronomer since childhood. Some astronomy pages on my website:
Galilean Moons of Jupiter, with predictions of Jupiter's four brightest moons, their shadows, and the Great Red Spot, and Saturn's Satellites, predictions of Saturn's brightest moons.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Moon, A collaborative compendium of information for anyone observing the moon through a telescope.
Astronomy sketches ... my homebuilt 8'' dobsonian ... general astronomy page.
I also wrote the monthly Shallow Sky column for the SJAA Ephemeris for many years.
Please visit the Shallow Sky Bookstore for book recommendations, and help support this site! Thanks!