This Week in Python 8/23: Coding for the Fun of it

xkcd In the Wild

One of the developers over at Everyday Python recently took inspiration from the internet famous xkcd webcomic and built a Python script designed to replace commonly used words in news articles with other words and phrases to make the news "fun".

Cool Stuff to do in Python: Mod the Sims

The famed game series "The Sims" is launching their fourth iteration in September and comes with a nifty little feature enabling the game to be modded with Python. Information on how exactly this may be done is scarce, but the folks over at The Sims VIP fan site seem to have got this news from the source.

More Cool Stuff to do in Python: Detect Skin Tones

Ever wonder how Google Safe Search works? One of the writers at PyImageSearch came up with a python algorithm to detect skin tones in an image. Even better, they wrote up a tutorial breakdown for exactly how they accomplished it and how you can write one yourself!

Python Events Around the World:

• O'Reilly Media is running an online presentation Thursday, August 27th about Writing Faster Applications in Python. Local times are listed in the article.
• EuroScipy 2014 is on August 27th and being held in Cambridge, England.
• Coding Grace is hosting a workshop by Kevin O'Brien in Dublin, Ireland on August 30th about using Python for Data Analysis.
• DjangoCon US is running from August 30th to Septeber 6th in Portland, Oregon and looks to have lots of awesome stuff going on!