Updates 2023/Q3

The third quarter includes a mix of personal and open source project updates.

Personal things

The third quarter unfortunately began in a similar fashion the second one ended: Being steamrolled by Covid. After I thought I was done with it back in June, it hit me for a second round in July and knocked me down for another three weeks or so. With projects still ongoing this situation unfortunately didn’t allow me to work on neither my open source projects nor this journal. Hence there haven’t been any noteworthy updates in that regard.

In addition, I had to deal with many other things on both, the business front, as well as on a personal level. While still struggling with Covid I had to take care of a mountain of bureaucracy. On the bright side of things, though, having done these things will allow me to pursue a couple of topics that I had planned for a long time.

At the beginning of August I started getting back into a routine of good food and working out, which was going well until I hit another wall at the end of August, when I (apparently) pushed myself slightly too much and fell sick once again. I was pretty much incapacitated until around the mid of September and basically used the prescribed bed rest to advance one particular client project, as well as the content on this website.

At the end of September I then got hit another time. That time, however, with a viral infection that forced me to an involuntary visit to the emergency room. I had dangerously high fever for several days I couldn’t seem to get rid of it no matter what I did. Long story short, as of this update my recovery is still on-going. The last quarter didn’t go exactly as planned, to put it mildly, hence there aren’t a lot of updates to share.

Open source projects

My open source projects have mostly received fixes and dependency upgrades.

Shell Time

Back at the beginning of September I began working on a little fun project: shell-time.

What Screen Time is for phones, Shell Time is for your shell. It’s a small command line tool that basically goes through your shell history file and analyzes it to show you statistics about when you’re most active on the command line, what commands your firing the most and which tools you haven’t used in such a long time that you probably already forgot you had them.

Shell Time however will only measure the time actively spend in the shell. Hence for example running vim and working on a document for three hours won’t be accounted for… yet. ;-)

The tool isn’t ready for prime time use yet and still under development, hence there’s not a lot too see yet. However, I’m looking forward to release a first working version within the next couple of weeks, together with a post here detailing how it works.

tldr

I have contributed the first set of tldr pages for OpenBSD to the tldr pages project, which include pkg_add, and pkg_info amongst others. Using for example tealdeer or the tldr Android app, you will be able to quickly look up usage info on these commands as soon as the PR was merged.

If you’re an OpenBSD enthusiast and would like to contribute to the tldr pages project you can, by forking the GitHub repo and adding .md files for undocumented commands.

Additionally, I have also updated another page to include a more useful example.

pastel

Another contribution went to pastel, which is a beautiful command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors, by the great David Peter, a fellow command line connoisseur and author of other beautiful CLI tools written in Rust.

The PR adds hyprpicker to the list of supported --color-picker tools for pastel.