Some minor lifehacking...
Dec. 17th, 2004 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsStill sick, but somehow oddly productive. I feel tired, I've done less caffeine than usual today, and yet I'm getting an awful lot done. I've done a couple of lifehacking things that make my life a bit easier, here and there.
The first is a program I wrote called animemonitor. It reads a configuration file (command-line configurable, but has a default file for each user) with lines that read "FEED <path>", "DONE <path>", and "WANT <regexp>". Feed and Done are directories into which you drop torrent files; Want entries are regular expressions. The program monitors downloadanime.org for new torrents and, for those that match any of the expressions in Want, checks to see if they're already in Feed or Done. If not, it downloads it and drops the torrent into Feed. Connected to a cron job that runs it every three hours or so, it automagically grabs all of the anime I want to watch.
Right now, animemonitor is broken. One of the python libraries it depends on is dying, and I'm trying to figure out how.
The second program is deeplycurious. DeeplyCurious is a proxy for liferea, my RSS reader of choice. DeeplyCurious keeps track of everything I deliberately click on in liferea via the "open in browser" button. Right now, it just logs the URLs I click; the idea is that in the future, it will keep "per day" archives of what I've read. That way, if I ever have a "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that..." moment, DeeplyCurious will help me find it. I'm hoping that DeeplyCurious will have an archive mode so that it will be able to add to a sub-folder of bookmarks under Mozilla with a list of days (or weeks) that it has recorded.
And finally, I've got my moleskine. I'm not sure why, but this is one of those notebooks that I really love. Combined with a decent gel ink pen, it's perfect for lots of the things that I need to be able to touch to accomplish, like my "todo" lists. One trick I've learned recently is to write in the upper-right-hand corner, diagonally, what the page is "about"; this makes finding things easier. Since I regularly update my todo lists by copying what I want to do to later pages, one trick I have is to cut that corner out with scissors when I'm done with it. It gets skipped in my riffles through the notebook. The other thing I do is use bookdarts for those things that must get pushed into other documentation, like story ideas or project notes.
I'm not quite up to the full Life Hacks (Getting Things Done, Geek-Style), but I've been implementing a couple of the things from 43 Folders and enjoying it.
One of the "life hacks" is that every power user syncs between two (or more) computers rather than back up his data, and every one has scripts that let him do that. I'm embarassed to admit that I haven't had scripts to do that for me; instead, I rely on my 10,000-entry deep shell history to remember "the usual backup commands" by grepping for them. I got over that today; I wrote "common_rsync" and "download_rsync," little four-line scripts that will do my daily synchronization for me.
The first is a program I wrote called animemonitor. It reads a configuration file (command-line configurable, but has a default file for each user) with lines that read "FEED <path>", "DONE <path>", and "WANT <regexp>". Feed and Done are directories into which you drop torrent files; Want entries are regular expressions. The program monitors downloadanime.org for new torrents and, for those that match any of the expressions in Want, checks to see if they're already in Feed or Done. If not, it downloads it and drops the torrent into Feed. Connected to a cron job that runs it every three hours or so, it automagically grabs all of the anime I want to watch.
Right now, animemonitor is broken. One of the python libraries it depends on is dying, and I'm trying to figure out how.
The second program is deeplycurious. DeeplyCurious is a proxy for liferea, my RSS reader of choice. DeeplyCurious keeps track of everything I deliberately click on in liferea via the "open in browser" button. Right now, it just logs the URLs I click; the idea is that in the future, it will keep "per day" archives of what I've read. That way, if I ever have a "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that..." moment, DeeplyCurious will help me find it. I'm hoping that DeeplyCurious will have an archive mode so that it will be able to add to a sub-folder of bookmarks under Mozilla with a list of days (or weeks) that it has recorded.
And finally, I've got my moleskine. I'm not sure why, but this is one of those notebooks that I really love. Combined with a decent gel ink pen, it's perfect for lots of the things that I need to be able to touch to accomplish, like my "todo" lists. One trick I've learned recently is to write in the upper-right-hand corner, diagonally, what the page is "about"; this makes finding things easier. Since I regularly update my todo lists by copying what I want to do to later pages, one trick I have is to cut that corner out with scissors when I'm done with it. It gets skipped in my riffles through the notebook. The other thing I do is use bookdarts for those things that must get pushed into other documentation, like story ideas or project notes.
I'm not quite up to the full Life Hacks (Getting Things Done, Geek-Style), but I've been implementing a couple of the things from 43 Folders and enjoying it.
One of the "life hacks" is that every power user syncs between two (or more) computers rather than back up his data, and every one has scripts that let him do that. I'm embarassed to admit that I haven't had scripts to do that for me; instead, I rely on my 10,000-entry deep shell history to remember "the usual backup commands" by grepping for them. I got over that today; I wrote "common_rsync" and "download_rsync," little four-line scripts that will do my daily synchronization for me.
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Date: 2004-12-17 11:46 pm (UTC)