I’ve been using CellarTracker to track our wine inventory and make comments on the wines we drink. I’ve been happy with it – it’s a lot easier to use than my previous technique, a spreadsheet. And it’s nice to see comments from other users when we’re considering a new wine.

We keep the “ready” wines in a little wine refrigerator that holds 25 bottles; everything else is in the wine closet. When the refrigerator is empty, I use CellarTracker’s “ready to drink” report to decide what to move to the refrigerator. Unfortunately, the report tells me which wines to move, but not where to find them – that requires following a link to another report for each and every bottle. That’s a pain.

Instead, I’ve been exporting the data about all the wines in inventory to a spreadsheet, then running a small Python program that sorts them and creates a moving list. It’s easy, but a little awkward, because I have to log into the site and do the export from a browser.

Today was wine-moving day, and I decided I could simplify the process. My first thought was to figure out how to read the cookies from the browser and use them with the Python Requests module to get the data. I even found a module that reads the cookies – but it doesn’t work with Safari. There is a program that takes Safari’s binary cookies and creates a plain-text version, but I’d have to parse its output and this way lies madness.

If there were an API to CellarTracker’s data, life would be easy. It’s on their roadmap, and it’s been there for at least ten years. I don’t think it’s their top priority.

But searching for “CellarTracker API Python” led me to the CellarTracker package on GitHub which lets me get the inventory into a Python list. I replaced the code I had to parse the CSV file that I manually downloaded with a call to the package, and I was done!

The wine refrigerator is full again. Life is good.

We didn’t take any exciting trips today; instead, I had an exciting upgrade experience. I’d upgraded two of my Macs to Monterey with no significant problems, so I decided to attack the one which runs all of our home automation next.

The upgrade ran smoothly, but then I saw a warning telling me that the Indigo Server would not run in future versions of Mac OS. This didn’t surprise me – it still uses Python 2.7, which reached end-of-life several years ago, and I know Apple plans to remove it from the system. And I know the Indigo people are going to convert to Python 3.

But then I discovered that I couldn’t connect to the server from my phone, and I started to wonder if the future had already arrived. I started trying to research downgrading to Big Sur – it’s possible, but not easy. So I looked on the Indigo Forums and found two pinned posts that I really should have read before I upgraded.

One said that they had a version of Indigo Server that would run under Monterey. I installed that version, and all was well. For now.

The second post says that whatever they did to make Indigo Server work on Monterey doesn’t work in the beta of the next point release (12.3). I turned off auto-upgrades for the system, so I should be safe. For now.

In honor of the sunset of Python 2, I offer this photo of sunset on the Mekong River in Cambodia, three years ago today.