There is always too much to do and too little time, it never gets all done so the real
challenge is to get the right things done at the right time, just to avoid
Unforseen Consequences...
In one more attempt at getting better organized than having lots of browser tabs always
open, emails unread in the inbox and, worst of all, uncountable ideas floating in the
brain with nowhere to rest, lets try Vikunja, the fluffy,
open-source, self-hostable to-do app.
Sometimes I wish for a centralized, automatically updated and moderately fancy-looking
application to keep track of multiple activities; mostly around digital media.
Audiobookshelf is pretty good but
separates podcasts from books and only shows yearly summary at the end of the year.
Audible does not offer even that, and no export options.
Jellyfin (and previously
Plex) don't go beyond marking
things as "done". Besides, movies and TV shows are not the kind of videos
I'm intersted in tracking progress with; video lectures are
(where was I with this Inkscape course?).
Paper books are very nearly not even a thing anymore, but it would still be nice
to be able to track progress on them, as well as reading e-Books in
Komga.
Video games are absurdly difficult to track progress for. Naturally grown from need,
a spreadsheet is works well enough to collect data across multiple platforms, but
it is limited, ugly and increasing slow as the library grows.
Steam shows only total and recent (last
2 weeks) gameplay, and probress is tracked in terms of achievements, not how
close you are to finish the main story. At least there is the option to query the
Steam Web API to periodically fetch gameplay
stats, so they can be kept at a higher resolution (daily, hourly, etc.).
Nintendo Switch Parental Control (Android app).
shows only gameplay time per game (and per user) in the current month, after that
it shows only montly summaries. There is no option to export any of this.
GOG requires installing their own (Windows-only)
Galaxy 2.0 client and the possiblity of exporting or even seeing your personal
gameplay stats appears to be not even a question.
Looking around for tracking applications in the awesome directory of
awesome-selfhosted, two
applications look promising and worth a try: Ryot and Yamtrack.
Navidrome is a self-hosted,
open source music server and streamer. It gives you freedom to
listen to your music collection from any browser or mobile
device I heard about in the
Linux Matters podcast.
PhotoPrism® is an AI-Powered Photos App
for the Decentralized Web I heard some good comments about. I tried it on my other Kubernetes cluster
and here are impressions so far.
A big chunk of my time is spent at the computer, also during
my downtime, and there is no clear separation between study,
chores, entertainment, etc. Work happens at other computers,
where time flies by sometimes at ridiculous speeds. I often find
myself wondering where did my day/week go?
For some time I've been using a badly-cobbled-together solution
with Bash scripts doing a few basic operations, all the time:
Detect when the screen saver is active (AFk).
Capture the id and title of the active windown (when not AFK).
Store those details in plain-text log files.
Aggregate those by window id into CSV files.
Import CSV files into a spreadsheet to clean it up.
The results have been barely enough to keep track of where my
weeks go, which has already been a relief; when someone (often me)
asks "why so little progress on X?", I can check the spreadsheet and
answer with numbers: because this week, out of 40 hours, ...
At home, however, the results have been very underwhelming. This
is due to completely different behaviour patterns, which is where
I hope ActivityWatch will help.
After weeks of using
Audiobookshelf
to listen to audiobooks daily, it dawned on me that the PDF reader
was probably not the best I could be using.
Then is also dawned on me that Audible is not my only source of
eBooks; I have a few from HumbleBundle deals and a few indipendent
authors who sell PDF files directly, as well as a small collection
of appliance manuals and electronics datasheets. All these files
have been scattered all over the place, never having a common home
where they could all be conveniently navigated and read.
Keep track of expenses and stuff is hard, thankless work.
Over the years I've done it, with varying degrees of success,
using a variety of solutions including my first ever
LAMP project, right after
learning PHP and MySQL, and once my bank's own built-in solutions
until they unceremonously took it away with no notice.
After this last disappointment, I decided to go the self-hosted
way taking inspiration from the list of
Money, Budgeting & Management
solutions by
Awesome-Selfhosted. Based on comments in several forums, I
decided to first try with
Firefly III.
Migrating a Plex Media Server to Kubernetes,
was a significant improvement for the maintenance of the Plex Media
Server I use to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, to keep me company
while I play games, but after all these years Plex remains a
very insufficient and deficient application for audiobooks.
Enter audiobookshelf (because Emby and Jellyfin are also not great)
