Rambling: Trying to stop being lazy pt. 1

This is not a tutorial mostly rambling and building some minor web projects. Warning has some fowl language.

I haven’t written on Medium in a while because I was going to setup my own blog but haven’t put the time into it. That’s on top of being lazy for past few weeks/months.

My main goal in life is financial freedom. I work in the tech industry thankfully so income-wise I’m doing alright for myself however I’m still in a lot of debt(student loans). I’m also supporting several of my own blood-related families so it’s a slow journey. Aside it’s just the “pro bro” mindset as I’ve coined it. Just being awesome but I have not achieved that. e.g. being fit/sociable/free/etc… I’ve been lazy/weak and haven’t tried to succeed. “What is success anyway” as mentioned freedom. $500K in investments to live off the 4% return, a FIRE man.

Projects addressed in this series

• (done) Bitcoin price alert by speech synthesis and desktop notification | repo
• Basic daily workout check box added to calorie counter PWA app
• Chrome extension to grab all open tabs/sort them by checkbox and save
• Link share by Chrome extension
• Unify cross platform app API (outside of home network)

So… last few weeks/months I have been extremely lazy. Recently I had two big blocks of time off: Christmas and New Years Eve but I did nothing. I had said that I would complete the slam crappy project within December as I have other projects lined up and have more work to do for TaggingTracker but I did nothing! This last weekend I binged both seasons of The Boys so that was two entire days gone. I mean I enjoyed myself but still. With the pandemic I have not gone to the gym, my excuse is if I catch the V I’ll either die or be bankrupt. I haven’t counted calories, I’m either sleeping or in front of a monitor. I don’t know why I can’t even get myself to commit to a simple 10 min exercise a day indoors. I’ve been losing shape/becoming round. I use to lift a lot so I had that V-shape/abs/pecs/lats/etc… but now just becoming a blob.

There have been several micro projects I wanted/would use in my day to day life. So I’m going to just build those now in this post.

One is a basic “get all open tabs” Chrome Extension with minor sort capability. I know these things exist but I want to make it.

I am sorry but I hate ads. I use adblock/ublock origin on desktop. So one thing that annoys me is when I see an article on my phone and I want to read it but the ads make me want to tie a brick to my legs and jump into an ocean. So this little app(cheating by using PWA as I suck at Android/Java) would allow me to copy an article link, send it to a raspberry pi computer that is running a browser with those adblocker extensions. Then it sends me back the webpage stripped or screenshotted. I know seems asinine to do but as far as I’m aware ad-blocking on mobile phones doesn’t really work yet. Maybe in Firefox and those Android apps could work but my phone is a piece of crap. I don’t need this to run all the time either, just a service I can call when I want. I just read through the Google suggested articles on a blank phone browser page.

Regarding the calorie counting, I have an app I built for that though I didn’t finish it regarding data export. So it’s useable but can’t get the data out. Also the way I setup the Dexie IndexedDB database was not great.

I want a daily “check list thing” for the workouts and also generally the budget/saving goals. I know these things exist, why make it yourself. Your own attempts would be even crappier and just waste your own time.

Other problems, I spend too much time on certain meme sites. I also should stop dumping hours into TV.

After the slam crappy project I have a smaller insect robot with basic navigation/guidance and then a forearm mounted self-righting dockable computer I’m starting to design.

Don’t think I shared this on Medium but I built this a while back from scratch, everything. It worked but it was disappointing both mechanically(not enough servos) and software wise. The software is the worst part, it’s dumb. The ultrasonic sensor in the front only works for perfectly flat walls.

This is the slam crappy project, it’s using OpenCV/contour finding to find objects by 1D and 2D histograms then using the distance sensors below figure out how far away they are. Then an onboard IMU keeps track of where they are as the robot moves. This platform is mounted on a basic 2-wheel robot in a tail-dragger configuration.

This is something I’ll probably never use even when it’s made but the main thing is the self-righting(looking at your face) and then being able to dock it to a big monitor/mouse/keyboard through conductive pins. Would be neat to do an HDMI splitter so either this or my Pine phone can be used.

I will do this, I will plank/force myself to hate myself to work. I seem to do better with minor sleep deprivation is another thing. I audio recorded myself sleeping and yeah… I snore. So using that can tell/cap my sleep to 5 hours I would think. Then I can keep that pissed off/driven mindset I think vs the dull complacent mindset I have when I sleep as long as I want.

Other minor apps, one that isn’t possible to my knowledge is a simpler interface over my SMS self reminder text… so if I get push notifications working on Android(don’t think so without a widget). I could opt for that with the simpler tile-based UI vs. text input by SMS.

After all this I’ll be back on the slam crappy project.

I feel it, the laziness, not wanting to do anything, it’s tough. I have the knowledge/time but I’m a lazy piece of crap.

Bitcoin price alert

So yeah… I got back into it. I got out for a while until recently when it jumped up to the $30–40K range. I don’t have much in it but after I finally switched to Coinbase Pro I’m able to “day trade” although not really because you need a lot of money to make noticeable gains, more than a couple bucks anyway by buying dips/selling when it increases by a couple hundred.

Anyway the point of this is I don’t want to be glued to the Coinbase Pro live transaction interface. The idea is pretty simple and I’m going off some old work I did where I connected to a GDAX websocket to get prices. I don’t need it to be really fast eg. checking every second is good enough.

Part of me wanted to make an actual hardware thing but it sucks having to power a piece of electronics. So the intent now is to setup a repo hosted on its own pages and that I think will fix with the potential https issues.

Wow this code still works, that’s cool. I don’t know how quick the responses are, it does not seem to be fixed. It’s not every second sometimes it’s 2 seconds or more per response but I think it’s good enough. I have to check the price and if it matches my limit(s) call the notification/speech synthesis methods. I’m just using the built in browser stuff.

Now I have to design some basic interface. Ehhh idk do I need React for this?

Well it’s not really a cool design or anything. Oh forgot a + input on top left for adding more and way to remove. Price output on right for ticker. Gains check on bottom left is a basic calculator I came up with to check what gains I’d get trading something bought at some price/selling it in future.

Much of my life I live in fear/worry/angst like afraid of maintenance people entering my apt/privacy but fuck that. Just do it. Adapt and overcome lol Bear Grylls.

“What if I fail” get on your knees and beg you know… get a shit job. That’s actually hard now I used to have washing plates as my fallback since it’s a low-entry barrier job. At least now knowledge-wise I have value. I have recruiters hitting me up almost everyday about software engineering jobs. Which this doesn’t mean I’m qualified just means their string-matching algos are finding my details. Of course when you get “Bachelor's degree” as a requirement you know, I’m out. But anyway I digress… Also after my current SWE job I’ll identify as a SWD since I don’t have that degree, I think the E comes from the e’s in degree hahaha…. but seriously. I’m very fortunate I got a role where there is an actual SW development cycle and extensive testing etc… agile/scrum and all that. I didn’t have that experience before.

Quick progress check at 2:08 PM

I’m at least separating code/purposes. I’m going to use localStorage to store this data regarding persistence. Theme is Monokai Pro Spectrum and yes I did buy a license.

Usually after I eat “it’s over” as in my productivity shits the bed. So I usually delay eating, I’ll drink energy drinks but don’t eat anything until close towards end of the day. On the other hand, when I shop I usually buy a lot of shit and binge eat/watch people playing Rust on YouTube.

3:17 PM messing around with validation stuff, just adding in way to delete

Ideally this would use a range vs. an exact price but I have some limit sells set for an exact price so it’s whatever. Ooh I get to make an .ico file been a while.

5:06 PM pretty hungry

So I’ve got a working codebase, see demo below. I didn’t show the gains calc but that works/just imported the code from jsfiddle.

I did test this it does work while the Chrome tab is not active/in focus so that’s good. There is potentially an issue where the speech runs more than once. This depends on the ticker and how many times it fires for that match. I tried to counter this with the activeSayPrice variable. So we’ll see if that works, I realized I should add a delay to the variable reset since the talking takes time.

I’m starting to lose drive… going to eat and I think vacuum the floor before it gets too late so I can do some exercises(look at him! he’s doing it!).

6:22 PM

I vacuumed nice, I achieved something.

My basic workout is body weight based: squats, pushups, sit ups. It’s not really anything hard more so getting into the habit of doing this without being lazy. That is a main reason I vacuumed so I can use my carpet floor for push ups/sit ups ha.

Well that was weak I just did 1 set of 10’s for the above.

I’m done for now, gonna chill, will do some more work tomorrow but pretty productive day today all things considered(npr plug).