What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Last night my daughter's toddler bed fell apart and I had to fix it. Some screws had come loose so it was an easy fix. Brought my toolbox into their (her and her twin brother's) room around bed time, fixed the bed, then began the usual bedtime routine. My wife and I left the room and that was that.

Except I left my toolbox in there because I'm forgetful. And you'd think the pokey screwdrivers, gardening shears, and other dangerous tools in there would've been a problem, but nope. My kids weren't interested in that stuff. They pulled out my chalk line and unspooled it. Fortunately it had been heavily used in a project recently, so there wasn't much chalk in it. But they really seemed to like the small, mostly-empty tube of thermal paste I keep in there for computer projects.

If anyone has used thermal paste, you know how incredibly messy it is. It's this thick, dark paste that gets everywhere if you're not careful. And it's the kind of thing where even just a little bit of it can make a big mess. It was all over the walls and all over them. Fortunately they were kind enough to put the cap back on the tube when they were done (bless them).

We tried to use wipes, but to no avail. So the first thing we did this morning was give them a bath and used a wash cloth to clean it all off. I also did some quick googling to see if thermal paste was toxic (it isn't), but 90% of the answers online were jokes about it improving your body temperature and allowing you to overclock yourself. Fucking hilarious stuff, but maybe not so much when you're making sure your kids are alright. They should be fine though.

Anyway, how're ya'lls days going so far?

My project involves reading text from a bunch of PDF form files for which I'm using PyPDF2 open source library. There is no issue in getting the text data as follows:

reader = PdfReader("data/test.pdf")
cnt = len(reader.pages)
print("reading pdf (%d pages)" % cnt)
page = reader.pages[cnt-1]
lines = page.extract_text().splitlines()
print("%d lines extracted..." % len(lines))

However, this text doesn't contain the checked statuses of the radio and checkboxes. I just get normal text (like "Yes No" for example) instead of these values.

I also tried the reader.get_fields() and reader.get_form_text_fields() methods as described in their documentation but they return empty values. I also tried reading it through annotations but no "/Annots" found on the page. When I open the PDF in a notepad++ to see its meta data, this is what I get:

%PDF-1.4
%²³´µ
%Generated by ExpertPdf v9.2.2

It appears to me that these checkboxes aren't usual form fields used in PDF but appear similar to HTML elements. Is there any way to extract these fields using python?

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

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Archive: https://archive.ph/t0oH2

From the article:

UK inflation is on course to hit 18.6 per cent in January — the highest peak in almost half a century — because of soaring wholesale gas prices, according to a new forecast from Citigroup based on the latest market prices.

The investment bank predicted that the retail energy price cap would be raised to £4,567 in January and then £5,816 in April, compared with the current level of £1,971 a year — shifts it said would lead to inflation “entering the stratosphere”.

[...]

UK and European wholesale natural gas prices are already trading at close to 10 times normal levels and other forecasters have also raised their inflation predictions.

Goldman Sachs and EY said they expected an inflation rate of at least 15 per cent around the start of next year and the Bank of England said this month that inflation would exceed 13 per cent towards the end of the year.

The energy regulator Ofgem will on Friday announce the energy price cap for the period between October and January, which most analysts expect to rise to more than £3,500 for a household with average usage of energy — an increase of 75 per cent on current levels.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

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This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!