Back in September, I posted about using the output of cal and plain text to track things. Here is the example of that format I listed in the post:

     August 2023    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       .  2  3  .  5
 .  7  .  .  .  .  .
 .  .  . 16  .  .  .
 .  .  .  .  . 25  .
 .  .  . 30  .      

2023/08/02 326 45 3.0 1/1 ell
2023/08/03 Swimming ~30 minutes
2023/08/05 Swimming 50min med diff
2023/08/07 393 50 3.48 2/1 elliptical
2023/08/16 345 50 3.29 2/1 elliptical
2023/08/25 1 hour intense swimming
2023/08/30 333 44 3.00 2/2 elliptical

I got so much great feedback from some "FediFriends"* immediately after that post that the next day, I came up with a script to automate the process of creating the "filtered" cal output automatically: fcal.

* post about what that means (for the uninitiated) coming soon

The core of the script is only roughly* 20 lines of shell (glorious things can be done in 20 lines of shell, my good fellow!!), half of which processes command line options (I could never get into using getopt/getopts), the other half of which constructs a sed one-liner to do the actual filtering.

* not counting spaces, comments, individual if/do lines, and super-simple functions like warn() and die()

Feeding the same data printed manually above into fcal yields the following:

~ $ fcal -o Aug 2 3 5 7 16 25 30
     August 2023    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       .  2  3  .  5
 .  7  .  .  .  .  .
 .  .  . 16  .  .  .
 .  .  .  .  . 25  .
 .  .  . 30  .      

Nobody ever said shell was beautiful, but dang if it isn't insanely useful and quick to construct basic things!


*Don't* use what works for you

Sun 26 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I was watching a youtuber I rather like, and he closed out his video talking about his pragmatic approach to operating systems. He said he used multiple OSes (some FOSS and some non-FOSS), and he summed up his approach with "Use what works for you."

This is not a polemic …

read more

UNIX is "dead," Part II

Sat 25 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I was re-reading my UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX article, and I realized something that helped me better classify the various types of UNIX OSes:

I see OSes like the BSDs as UNIXes, while I view MacOS and many Linux distros (particularly the Gnome-oriented ones, more about that later …

read more

UNIX is dead. Long live UNIX

Sun 12 November 2023 by R.L. Dane

I remember once watching a video of presenter at a Linux conference boldly proclaim, "UNIX is dead."

As someone who worked on UNIX systems for over a decade, and who's played with UNIX variants off and on for three decades, that is a pretty incendiary statement.

With apologies to Sophocles …

read more

Using `cal` and plain text to track things

Tue 05 September 2023 by R.L. Dane

I know everyone's got their preferred notes app/platform, but I've been using SimpleNote for several years now, and I'm quite fond of it. Not only does it have very usable mobile and cross-platform desktop apps, it also has alternate apps like nvpy (a GUI) and sncli, an excellent command …

read more

Fun with FreeBSD

Wed 22 March 2023 by R.L. Dane

Do *not* do the following :D
Please scroll down to the **Update** section below, instead

I was watching this video about FreeBSD last night, and the gentleman made mention of a blog which had extra information on FreeBSD. Looking at the blog, I found an excellent article describing how to …

read more