What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

The past couple weeks I took a break from my other projects and wrote a few utilities for automating qBittorrent.

• The first one, torrents-add extracts data from torrent files and imports it into a SQLite database.
• The second, computers-add scans computers via SSH and sees how active the disks are over 5 minutes and how much free space there is.
• allocate-torrents uses the data generated by the first two commands to allocate the biggest torrents to the largest free space drive until either all torrents or all free space has been allocated (with a default buffer of 50GiB).
• torrents-info shows some interesting stats so that it is easier to use qBittorrent-nox from the CLI without needing to open a web browser. You can also use this subcommand to search for specific torrents or files of torrents and print that info or delete them from qBit.
• torrents-stop helps to filter out torrents where the activity has died down. I use this in conjunction with process-media to extract data from archives (iso, rar, etc) and shrink it down so that I can seed more stuff...

Playing around with making a replication of Emprie Attack, a browser game that existed until 2017. And game of life was a warm up.

It's structured weird because I was intending to make this as a hacky entry into t0.vc/g.

https://proto.qot.nz

So, I stumbled across this hybrid language for making parser-like text adventure games. For those not deeply invested in this ancient niche, most interactive fiction games are either choice-based (twine/choicescript/ink/etc) or parser-based (inform, TADS, adrift, etc.) Choice-based games are great for mobile users, as nothing needs to be typed in, but they lack some of the nostalgia old guys like me get from playing parser games (games where you have to type).

Sadly, it's tough to get a modern audience interested in parser games as mobile devices lack great keyboards and we're a world of link-clickers. Anyway, not long ago I stumbled across a very cool hybrid solution, Gruescript by Robin Johnson (https://versificator.itch.io/gruescript?download).

It basically gives you the parser-like feel but offers clickable links. It's neat. It's different. It's kinda fun!

I've been playing around with it on and off the last few weeks and decided it really needed a visual studio code syntax highlighter.

So I made one. :)

Don't bother hunting for it on the marketplace because I have no idea how to get it there, or if I'd even want to, but it was a fun little adventure.

My next step is to work up some sort of "compiler/assembler/packager" to get the gruescript into a web page along with the necessary javascript so someone could write in vscode and publish to a folder location. Still a ways to go for that, but this has been a fun little project thus far.

This is just an idea for now, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it any time soon, especially because I feel like I suck at GUI programming.

I would like to build something that just shows a calendar view of past completions of recurring tasks. Maybe a list view as well. But it should have some form of knowledge about the ideal frequency of a recurring tasks, without forcing that frequency I guess?

This is different from a to-do list because it's more of a reflection on previous tasks and would allow you to contemplate (outside of the app) if the frequency you're completing tasks is effective. It would be a bit similar to a streak tracker, but I think streak psychology is negative for some people- if I fail to maintain a streak it makes me want to give up entirely.

One example is maintaining our pool. In the winter it's pretty easy, but it's still important to perform some maintenance every week-ish. In the summer, it's something we have to do almost daily. There are also some variables, like if it's really windy one day, it may require some attention that day or the next.

In this scenario, it's helpful to have a reminder of when you've completed this task last. In the winter it isn't something that feels urgent but it still does need to get done regularly. Being able to see that I've done it 10 days ago would be useful so I know to go do it ASAP.

TL;DR - tracking of previously completed dates of recurring tasks, displayed in both calendar and list format.