Automatic cat treats
Demo: https://sjchiass.github.io/cat_treats/
Cats really like treats. Like, really, really like treats.
I used to hide them in places to give my cats a bit of an adventure, but I thought I was a bit too predictable or maybe too unimaginative. So I wrote down all the possible hiding spots I could think of. I could then use my computer to randomly sample them. This gives variety and unpreditability.
Doing this in Python is not hard. You can build your list of hiding posts as a nested dictionary. It makes it hierarchical and easy to read.
The cats now spend more time looking for their treasures. While it used to take them 5 minutes to find everything, it now takes them closer to 30. If they miss a spot but smell that something is there, they keep revisiting until they find it.
Any basic Python should run the code since it only uses the random and argparse from the standard library (pre-installed).
The program accepts command-line arguments. You can run python cat_treats.py --help to get some hints. This comes from the argpase library.
The --replacement decides whether the code runs with random.choices() (replacement) or with random.sample() (without). If you want your hiding spots to have more than one treat, use --replacement. See the documentation for random.
You can fork this repo and it should automatically generate a GitHub pages like this: https://sjchiass.github.io/cat_treats/. Let me know if it doesn't.
Alternatively, you can clone this to your Linux computer and add an entry to crontab with crontab -e. Wikipedia gives a fairly good introduction.
