July 6, 2017

Screenshot

There are times in life when you need to keep track of periodic events as they happen. For example when you have a new baby it is sometimes useful to keep track of when they feed, nappy changes, etc. Another example might be tracking how often you eat chocolate or drink beer.

Clerk is a simple self-hosted web application that I built which you can install to the home screen of your device (by doing "add to home screen" in your browser) or load up on your tablet or laptop. You can then keep track of simple events with two taps on your device - once to open the app and once to record the event.

Screenshot 2

For every event logged the event type, timestamp, and comment are stored in CSV files. Events are stored in individual CSV files - one file per event type. You can also download all CSVs stiched together with an extra column for the event name.

Features

  • Web based.
  • Easy to deploy.
  • Self-hosted & FLOSS.
  • Simple text based CSV format.
  • Allows multiple people to log events.
  • Mobile friendly - "Add to Home Screen" web-app.

Install

To require authentication, first create a password file:

htpasswd -c /path/to/.htpasswd username

Then copy ./example.htaccess to .htaccess and edit it.

Enjoy!

June 8, 2017

Scout and I made this stop-motion short film.

How we made it:

  • We used an old Android phone with one of those $10 phone tripods to take each frame.
  • We flipped through the stills in Ristretto by hand, recording the output with RecordMyDesktop.
  • We used avconv to convert between formats.
  • We used Audacity to record the audio.
  • We used OpenShot to edit the video.

May 31, 2017

watch-make is a script that rebuilds your project only when make detects it needs a rebuild, for example when source files change.

Features:

  • Works with any existing Makefile based project.
  • No dependencies apart from make.
  • Passes any arguments to make (such as -C mydir).
  • Silent if there is nothing to build and does not swallow output when there is.

I wrote it in response to this Stack Overflow question.

The source code is hosted on GitHub.

Install it

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chr15m/watch-make/master/watch-make > ~/bin/watch-make
chmod 755 ~/bin/watch-make

Full source code

#!/bin/sh

while true;
do
  if ! make -q "$@";
  then
    echo "#-> Starting build: `date`"
    make "$@";
    echo "#-> Build complete."
  fi
  sleep 0.5;
done

May 8, 2017

IMG_20170506_150538.jpg

No point crying!

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

March 5, 2017

Simple line sketch of a robot walking in a natural scene.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-- Thoreau, Walden