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First published on Tuesday 23 February 2021 01:00:00 CET
Last revised on Saturday 10 April 2021 02:00:00 CEST
On this page I’ll try to keep an up to date overview of what things currently keep me occupied.
I frequently use #hashtags in my social media posts, both as a way to hopefully increase discoverability, as well as an attempt at organising them, so I can more easily find my posts again, later on.
You’ll see I use hashtags in this page as well. Here they don’t serve as much (yet) for their own organisation or discoverability, but more as a way to explore related posts I’ve made through my Mastodon profile, @FiXato@mastodon.social. The hashtag-links will point to mastodon.social’s profile filter page, where you can get an overview of my public posts that are filtered by the given hashtag.
my Mastodon profile, @FiXato@mastodon.social
In the future this might change, to present you with these filtered results from my Mastodon profile, as well as a list of relevant #blog posts, but for now those are just plans.
In 2018 we welcomed our new-born son #BeardGrabber to our family. I currently take care of him as a #stayAtHomeDad in the day-to-day life while his mother is at work.
While I don’t have a lot of free time where I have the #headspace to do #coding, I do have a wide variety of #petProjects between which I frequently shift my focus, and on which I like to spend some time whenever I can:
In July of 2020 I started on #KaEDetApp, an #edutainment app for #BeardGrabber that’s basically an #HTML5-based #soundBoard app.
It allows him to click/tap on images of things, or letters / numbers, and hear the linked sounds so he hopefully can create the relevant associations. For example, a picture of a train, and various sounds the train makes, or the numbers 0 to 10 and what they sound like in #Norwegian (and later on in #Dutch and #English too, as we’d like to try to raise him #trilingual or at the very least #bilingual).
Currently I have a script that can grab the image and metadata off #Unsplash, given an unsplash.com URL, as well as the metadata and sound file(s) from #FreeSound for FreeSound.org URLs, and store the data in a #JSON storage file which is used by the separate HTML5 generator script. This is combined with a very simple #Android app that is not much more than a #WebView element which loads the #HTML app from a URL (and later on from embedded files).
The app currently supports playing multiple audio files simultaneously for each 'tile', and subsequent taps will play/stop the tile’s relevant audio files. Future plans include support for sequencing or randomising multiple audio streams, so a single tile can not only teach sounds or a single word, but also multiple words in different languages.
In September of 2020 I added another project to my ever-growing list of vapourware #PetProjects, in part to learn more about #Python, as well as to hopefully end up with a unified solution for the various #StreamingMedia platforms I use, such as #YouTube and #Twitch.
Currently it is able to fetch a list of my subscriptions from YouTube, and display their videos in a grid. Clicking on a video will launch #mpv with the given video URL.
Data is cached to prevent querying the #API every load, but loading the cached #JSON files is rather slow and could do with some optimisations. Also the #GUI is very spartan, and doesn’t handle resizing well. Building GUIs is a challenge I’d like to finally overcome though…​
Definitely a #ScratchYourOwnItches project.
In short #ScratchYourOwnItches is about projects that provide a solution for a problem or issue you are facing yourself. The proverbial 'itch' that needs 'scratching'.
A project that’s in need of a catchier title. ;) Started it in April of 2020 I think. I wanted to have a #playlist of #MSX music collected from a topic on the MSX Resource Center, but it was a variety of links on various #StreamingMedia services such as #YouTube, #SoundCloud and #NicoNico.
So, I built the Streaming Media Interactive Playlist tool which currently supports YouTube, SoundCloud and NicoNico links and can auto-advance between each of those.
Streaming Media Interactive Playlist tool
If you want to give it a go, you can check out this example playlist of MSX- and MSX-related tunes.
example playlist of MSX- and MSX-related tunes
After months of inactivity, I recently (#November2020) picked this project up again. Initially just to add #NicoVideo support, but that quickly lead to renewed interest, and an excuse to learn a bit more about #ECMAScript #es6 to structure the #JavaScript code in a more #ObjectOrientedProgramming way.
Probably also an example of #ScratchYourOwnItches.
FiXato’s Recommended Music is a single HTML page generated by my Share Music Recommendations script written in #Bash. First commit was in March of 2020, but I’m not quite sure if that’s also when I first started coding on it. It’s probably somewhere in either my #Mastodon logs, or my #GooglePlus exports. :)
Share Music Recommendations script
While I currently don’t use it very often, I do like the idea that I can quickly #share (or in a way #bookmark) a song that’s #NowPlaying, with a short description of why I like it, directly from my #CLI. (And thus also eventually easily more easily tie it into other scripts.)
MSXplay is a wonderful service where people can create their own #MML-based #MSX #chiptunes with its online editor, save them, and share a direct link to it for later playback through the same service.
Unfortunately it doesn’t come with a public list of songs, so I created MSXplay Ripper to scrape an MSX Resource Center topic, and #Twitter (by proxy of #Nitter) for #MSXplay links, download the MML files, and convert them to #MGS files with the #MGSC compiler for playback with other compatible players.
Mostly created as a #ProofOfConcept tool for a couple of MSX users on a #Discord server I frequent.
FiXaNote is a #notes #browserExtension that will give you quick access to multiple columns of text-areas for note-taking, which will automatically be saved in local storage and optionally synced with your account through #StorageSync.
I personally use it frequently for copying snippets and commonly used #Unicode symbols, and is most certainly created to #ScratchYourOwnItches.
Flags of the World is a #Python script that (currently) uses #PublicDomain data from the CIA #WorldFactbook and transforms it into an #HTML5 + #JavaScript single page application for an easy overview of the #flags of the #world that can quickly be filtered by keywords.
Feel free to check out my own example list of Flags of the World.
example list of Flags of the World
I guess this is more of a #ScratchHerItches project ;-), rather than Scratch Your Own Itches, as I started it more as a resource for my SO @Siiw. :)
comics_tweaks.user.js is a #UserScript to improve viewing and navigating #webComics. Currently it only supports #xkcd and the NSFW #comic #Oglaf. Main features are back and forth controls with ctrl+left/right, loading of next/previous pages over XHR, and a simplified layout which focuses on the comic, and displaying (a history of) its alt-text and titles.
I’m enjoying #Mastodon (and the extended #Fediverse) a lot more than other #SocialMedia such as #Twitter, so it’s no surprise that some of my projects involve these social media platforms:
Mastoffline is my latest #ScratchYourOwnItches project. After getting frustrated yet again by slowdowns and input lag in the default web UI of #Mastodon, and having #QualityOfLife improvement ideas I can’t easily implement with just #UserScripts, I decided to try and build something in #Python, using @halcy’s excellent #MastodonPy library. It’s also an opportunity for me to explore developing a #GUI using the #Kivy library, and so far I like it a lot better than #wxPython.
Project #TootPortal got started on Friday 15th of January, 2021, though has been an idea that had been brewing in my head for several months before that. In short, I want it to take a simple #Markdown file that contains a list of URLs to individual toots, or toot storms, and output a HTML portal page that has expanded those status updates to stand-alone content around a specific subject. For instance: a list of toots with my own context about handheld console #gaming.
Its code is currently still only living in my local development directory
With #CliPlayerQueue I try to develop and provide a #CLI toolset for browsing your #YouTube and #Twitch feeds, and playing back those media files with your preferred player (by default #MPV), while keeping track of your media history, and allowing for quick and easy filtering of these feeds and media based on title, content creator and/or publication date.
If you want to get a bit of an idea of how it works, you can watch an asciinema recording I made of it:
5JW2ctXcoTaDytQEyXtORPlg8 [IMG]
CLI Player Queue’s repository is currently hosted on my GitHub profile.
CLI Player Queue’s repository
Text-UI based #TUILauncher is a #ProofOfConcept script I primarily created for a #Fediverse friend, Kelbot, who was looking for a simple way to run commands by pressing a button from his console/terminal-based dashboard.
TUI Launcher’s repository is currently hosted on my GitHub profile.
Created with #Jekyll and #AsciiDoc / #AsciiDoctor, my blog is an ongoing project as well as I try to incorporate my pre-parsers to get #hashtags working the way I want in it, as well as style it the way I want it. Of course actually writing content regularly for it is a challenge in itself…​
Templating and theming the blog is taking longer than I’d hoped, and as such it’s not yet available, apart from this web-based list of projects I work on.
web-based list of projects I work on
In the mean time most of the actual content is also available via Gemini, something I’d describe as a modernised version of the Gopher protocol:
To maintain my Gemini pod and gem-log I have created a set of tools to help process my blog’s asciidoc files, generate index listings, and add view stats. A lot of these tools are currently only available locally, but eventually they’ll live in my Gemini-Tools repo at SourceHut.
my Gemini-Tools repo at SourceHut
openMSX is a cross-platform #emulator that strives for an accurate emulation of the #MSX #HomeComputer and aside from supporting #MSX1, #MSX2, #MSX2Plus and the MSX #turboR, it also has support for #Colecovision and #Spectravideo #SVI318 and #SVI328 systems.
It’s my go-to emulator when I want to quickly play an MSX game, especially since I currently don’t really have the available space to set up one of my own physical machines.
For several years I’ve provided openMSX.FiXato.net as a central repository for official development builds for #Windows, #macOS, #Android and #openDingux, with originally providing the (at the time still) #OSX builds myself, while also providing the occasional support on IRC and MRC forums. In more recent years I’ve also started experimenting with its embedded scripting language, #TCL, so this is another area where I occasionally spend my free #coding time. My latest work-in-progress contribution is to the #openMSXDebugger, which included my first steps into programming #C++.
Created in 2019 as a way to export and transform data from the now-defunct #GooglePlus social media platform, #PlexodusTools is still something I want to put more time in at some point, especially to further develop the conversion and querying tools for the existing #GoogleDataTakeout / #DataLiberation archives, as well as data previously exported with Plexodus-Tools itself.
Unfortunately motivation for it is rather low at the moment due to set-backs from for instance more and more data servers being wound down, and thus the majority of the existing scripts now basically being useless. The current project should probably be archived as-is to a separate branch, and still useful scripts for addressing existing archive backups kept on the main branch.
It’s a daunting task I’m currently not interested though, especially since there does not seem to be much/any interest/feedback from other users, even while the project was active.
It might seem like a lot of projects, and perhaps they indeed don’t get as much love as each of them deserve. However, it currently is a way for me to prevent getting burned out on a project; I can just swap over to a different one (or start a new one :$).
It also has a tendency to lead to cross-pollination; whether it is discovering ways projects can work together, or programming techniques learned in one project, to be applied to another.
So, yes, it is a lot, and projects might get neglected over a longer period, but I hope it leads to less loss of interest in the long run, and more ideas in the short run.
I like winding down at the end of the day with a film or an episode of some kind of series. Primarily on #Netflix, though occasionally also through other providers.
I should probably split this up, and only list the things I’ve watched in the running year, or past x months though. :)
Films I’ve recently watched, or which I am planning to watch include:
Series I’ve recently watched, or which I am planning to watch include:
* Lower Decks
* Discovery S1-S3
* Short Treks S2
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![5JW2ctXcoTaDytQEyXtORPlg8 [IMG]](https://asciinema.org/a/5JW2ctXcoTaDytQEyXtORPlg8.svg){kind=link}