Weekly report 20-38

Good news

TUI article

I have finally completed the section about colours and updated the rest of the article with more information. Target achieved. I’m so tired of this, and who knows when I’ll return to finish the remaining parts. At least it’s in a much better state now than it used to be a month ago. Quite a few people end up reading it.

Where did my time go?

At some point I’ve started, in Vala, a project to track how I spend my time with the computer, by simply watching the title of the active window. Unfortunately, I haven’t got too far beyond making a ‘trivial’ port of the prototype.

The project hasn’t lost any of its importance since then, so it seemed worth getting back to. I’ve made some first steps by spending some time setting up vala-language-server so that I can finally enjoy IDE features such as tab completion, which in turn forced me to add the ability to use the Meson build system, as it has first-class support for the language, unlike the original CMake that can’t produce a useful compile_commands.json file. Sadly this language server likes to cause Qt Creator to crash, adding to the pile of LSP bugs I’m too tired to report in Qt Project’s awful bugtracker, and I have to resort to using VIM again, just like with gopls before. All appears to work fine there, at least.

Following this little exercise, I did some research and devised a design for what could be the first usable version, then turned that into small steps that could be done within a few hours each. I hope to finish this program before the end of the year. Any subsequent additions will be about aggregating data in SQL and building a UI around it, something Vala shines at.

Thoughts

Sometimes it turns out to be a good idea to postpone your projects, as they get much easier to materialise in the future—​either because you get more skill and knowledge, or because other people fill in gaps.

That being said, I’m not too happy with how many things I run away from before they’re done. Finish one, start two. It’s a matter of priorities and overshooting with my ambitions. If you’re not perfectly fine with spending a lot of time on something, look for shortcuts and compromise, pay someone else to do it, or abandon the idea altogether. Life truly is short.

Guess where this is

Apparently cobblestones are great for QR codes. Another one has apparently been turned into a rick-roll. This one’s still fine. If you manage to read it, that is—​it’s very large and your reader has to be able to deal with the skew (or you just need to be very, very tall).

QR code in cobblestone

Comments

Use e-mail, webchat, or the form below. I'll also pick up on new HN, Lobsters, and Reddit posts.